Home › Recipes › Chocolate Eclairs
Chocolate Eclairs
1/3 cup butter, 1 cup milk, 2 tablespoons sugar, 4 eggs, 1 cup flour. Put butter, milk and sugar in saucepan. Bring to the boiling point, and add flour all at once and stir vigorously, using a wooden spoon. Remove from range as soon as mixture cleaves to spoon. Cool and add four eggs, one at a time, beating two minutes between the addition of each egg and five minutes after eggs are added. Shape mixture on a slightly buttered sheet four and one-half inches long by one inch wide, by forcing through a pastry tube; they should be one inch apart to allow for spreading. Bake in a moderate oven about twenty-five minutes. If removed from oven before they are thoroughly cooked, they will fall.
Cool, make a cut in the side of each without breaking apart, and fill with either of the following preparations.
CREAM FILLING No. 1 To one cup heavy cream add four tablespoons sugar, one-half teaspoon vanilla and a few grains salt. Beat until stiff, using an egg beater or wire whisk. CREAM FILLING No. II Scald one and one-half cups milk. Mix three and one-half tablespoons flour with three-fourths cup sugar and one-eighth teaspoon salt, and add two eggs slightly beaten. Combine mixtures and cook in double-boiler fifteen minutes, stirring constantly until thickened, afterwards occasionally. Cool and flavor with one-half teaspoon vanilla.
A standard pâte à choux written in Boston Cooking School shorthand, with two fillings and — despite the title — no chocolate anywhere in the text. A few points of translation.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cook it throughThe paste must be stirred over heat until it cleaves to the spoon in a mass, and the baked shells must be thoroughly cooked before they leave the oven; the recipe warns that they will fall otherwise. It is the whole difference between an éclair and a damp collapsed finger.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in this period is usually reckoned at about 350–375F. Many modern bakers start choux hotter — around 425F for the first 10-15 minutes to force the steam that lifts them — then drop to 350F to dry them out, for 30-40 minutes total, rather than the twenty-five given here. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- "Remove from range"Range means the stove top, not the oven. Nothing here is baked until the shaping stage.
- Cool means lukewarmLet the paste stand only until it stops steaming and is warm rather than hot to the hand. Cold paste takes the eggs badly; hot paste scrambles them.
- Eggs and beating timesEggs of the period are often said to have run smaller than a modern large egg. Add the fourth in stages and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon that holds a peak — it may not need all of it. The five-minute final beating is unnecessary with a stand mixer or a food processor; two or three minutes on medium is plenty.
- The missing chocolateThe title assumes a chocolate icing the printed text never gives. Finish with a simple glaze of melted chocolate thinned with a little cream or hot water, or a confectioners' sugar icing with melted unsweetened chocolate beaten in.
- Filling No. IIThis is plain pastry cream. Fifteen minutes in a double boiler is right for the vessel, but modern practice cooks it directly in a heavy saucepan to a full boil for a minute or two, which cooks out the flour taste and deactivates the enzyme in the yolks that would otherwise thin it on standing. Press plastic wrap on the surface while it cools.
- Filling and yieldFilling No. 1 is sweetened whipped cream and must go in within an hour or two of serving. The batch makes roughly 12 to 15 shells at the size given; filled éclairs soften quickly and are best eaten the day they are made.
Pâte à choux is a French pastry technique of long standing, generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian and French court cookery, and the éclair — literally "flash of lightning," often said to refer to how fast it is eaten — is credited by tradition to nineteenth-century Parisian pâtissiers. By 1900 it had become standard American cooking-school fare, and the phrasing here, with its "remove from range" and its exact beating times, is the clipped instructional voice of the Boston Cooking School that Fannie Farmer made the national style. If the book is, as it appears to be, a promotional volume from Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, the oldest chocolate manufacturer in the United States, then it belongs to the genre of recipe collections published to put a company's cocoa and baking chocolate into home kitchens — which would make it all the more striking that this particular page names chocolate in the title and then never calls for any.