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Icing for Eclairs
1 cup sugar, 5 tablespoons cold water, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate.
Put sugar and water in saucepan, stir until sugar is dissolved, and cook without stirring until mixture, when tried in cold water, will form a syrup thick enough to coat the finger but not thick enough to form a jelly-like ball. Turn on a platter, let stand until cooled slightly, then stir with a wooden spoon until white and creamy. Add melted chocolate and stir until mixed. Put in saucepan placed over larger saucepan of boiling water, and beat until of right consistency to spread. To coat eclairs, it is best to apply icing with a butter brush.
This is poured fondant with chocolate beaten in — a sugar syrup cooled, worked until it crystallizes fine and white, then warmed just enough to flow. The whole recipe turns on how far you cook the syrup and how completely you cool it before working it.
- The syrup stage"Thick enough to coat the finger but not a jelly-like ball" is vaguer than modern practice allows; fondant is generally cooked to around the soft-ball stage (about 238F), though the test as described here sounds a little short of that. Undercooked syrup gives icing that never sets; overcooked gives a stiff, grainy mass.
- Cool before beatingThe instruction to turn it onto a platter and let it stand is the hinge. Beating hot syrup produces large crystals and a gritty fondant. Let it fall to about 110F — barely warm to the palm — before the spoon touches it.
- Premium No. 1 ChocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, no sugar and no added cocoa butter. One ounce of modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the direct substitute; do not use semisweet, which will throw the sugar balance off.
- The platterA cold marble slab or a rimmed sheet pan works better than a platter, since the wider, cooler surface drops the temperature evenly. Wet the surface lightly first and the fondant will lift more readily.
- ReheatingThe saucepan set over boiling water is a double boiler, and it should be warm rather than hot — around 100–105F. Above that the fondant loses its gloss and dries dull and chalky on the eclair.
- Butter brushA butter brush was a soft-bristled pastry brush. Any modern pastry brush will do, though many bakers now dip the eclair face-down into the warmed fondant and draw it across the rim of the pan.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Fondant keeps well, covered tightly, and rewarms over hot water.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts dated itself to 1780, when Baker took sole charge of a chocolate mill on the Neponset River begun some years earlier, and by the late nineteenth century it was among the best-known chocolate names in the United States. Its Choice Recipes booklets were advertising in the guise of a cookbook — the formulas call for Baker's products by trade name — and editions carry recipes credited to Maria Parloa, Fannie Merritt Farmer and other Boston Cooking School figures. The technique here is fondant, sugar deliberately recrystallized fine enough to feel smooth on the tongue, which is what gives a proper eclair its thin lacquered shell rather than the soft buttercream often used now.