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Chocolate Eclairs
Beat the yolks of four eggs and three-quarters of a pound of castor sugar well together; beat the whites to a stiff froth. Mix in a salt-spoonful of baking powder, and add gradually, and alternately with four ounces of flour, to the creamed sugar. Have ready some shallow buttered tins, about three inches long and one inch wide, and place a spoonful of the mixture in each. When such tins are not obtainable, little cases made of stiff writing paper, stitched at the corners, will serve the purpose. Bake in a steady oven for half an hour. When nearly cold cover them with the following mixture. Break three squares of chocolate into a breakfast cup, and place it in boiling water until dissolved. Beat the whites of two eggs to a stiff froth, add eight table-spoonfuls of castor sugar, and beat all together. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. for twelve clairs.
This is an éclair in name and shape only: there is no choux paste, no piping bag and no cream filling. What you are making is a sweet sponge batter baked in finger tins and masked with an uncooked meringue icing.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe recipe does say the whites go in alternately with the flour, but not how: fold rather than beat, and stop as soon as the streaks vanish. With only a saltspoonful of baking powder, most of the lift comes from the air in those whites.
- Castor sugar and the ratioCastor sugar is superfine sugar; ordinary granulated will work if you pulse it briefly. Three-quarters of a pound of sugar to four ounces of flour is roughly 340 g to 115 g, a sponge far sweeter and more fragile than modern proportions. Expect something closer to a sponge finger than a cake.
- Salt-spoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. That is all the baking powder the recipe uses, and at this proportion it is a safety net rather than a raising agent.
- A steady oven, and a shorter time"Steady" points to an even, unwavering heat; a moderate modern oven, roughly 325-350F (165-175C), is a reasonable equivalent, though the book gives no figures. Half an hour looks long for finger-sized sponges, which may well be set and pale gold much sooner, so watch them and bake to colour rather than to the clock.
- Tins and paper casesThree inches by one inch is close to a modern éclair or financier mould. The stitched writing-paper cases are a genuine period workaround; parchment or a mini-loaf/financier tin does the same job with less trouble.
- Three squares of chocolateA "square" here is a piece broken from a cake or bar of plain chocolate; its weight is not fixed by the text, so judge by eye and expect a sweetened plain chocolate rather than unsweetened. The breakfast cup set in boiling water is simply a bain-marie — a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water.
- The icing is rawTwo raw whites beaten with eight tablespoons of sugar and melted chocolate is never cooked. Use pasteurised egg whites, or substitute a cooked Italian meringue or a plain chocolate glaze, particularly if serving children, the elderly or anyone pregnant.
- YieldTwelve, as the costing implies. They stale quickly at this sugar level and are best eaten the day they are iced.
Éclair means "flash of lightning" in French, a name usually explained by how fast the pastry is eaten; the choux-paste original is generally traced to nineteenth-century Paris, with the name and the pastry recorded from around the middle of the century onward, and is often credited to Antonin Carême, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What Cassell's prints here is the English domestic drift of that idea: the éclair had come to be known chiefly by its shape and its chocolate coat, so a cook without a piping bag or a reliable hand with choux could produce a finger of sponge in a buttered tin and call it the same thing. The instruction to stitch cases out of stiff writing paper says a good deal about the readership — a household that wanted the fashionable Continental sweet but did not own the specialist tins to make it.