Home › Tarts, Puffs and Patties › Chocolate Eclairs
Chocolate Eclairs
¼ pint water 4 ounces Five Roses flour (sifted) 3 eggs 2 ounces butter Sugar Essence of vanilla or lemon Pinch of salt Put the water, butter and salt into a saucepan. When boiling, draw from fire, stir in flour and sugar till it becomes a stiff paste-boil well. Add flavoring and eggs one at a time. Force into finger lengths. Bake in moderate oven to a pale brown. Fill with custard (or whipped cream) and cover with chocolate icing when cold. (See Eclair Custard.)
This is standard choux paste under an older name and older measures. The recipe is sound; the two places it will trip a modern cook are the vague oven and the instruction to bake only to a pale brown.
- The measuresFive Roses was a Canadian flour, so the ¼ pint is Imperial: 5 fl oz, or a generous ½ cup. Four ounces of flour is about 1 scant cup (115 g) and 2 ounces of butter is 4 tablespoons. The sugar is unquantified — a teaspoon or two is all choux wants.
- "Boil well"This is the hinge. After the flour goes in, keep the pan on the heat and beat the paste for two to three minutes until it forms a smooth ball and leaves a film on the pan bottom. Drying the paste is what lets it take the eggs and puff.
- Eggs one at a timeLet the paste cool for a few minutes first or the eggs will scramble. Three eggs is a guide, not a rule — stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon rather than a lump.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven in this period is 350–375°F. Éclairs do better started at 425°F for about 15 minutes to force the rise, then dropped to 350°F to dry out. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- "Pale brown" is too littleModern practice bakes choux to a deep golden brown, 30–40 minutes total, and the shells should sound hollow and feel light. Pulled pale, they are still damp inside and will sag within minutes. A slit in the side at the end lets steam escape as they cool.
- "Force into finger lengths"A piping bag with a plain ½-inch tube; pipe strips about 4 inches long, well spaced. This quantity gives roughly a dozen.
- Filling and icingFill only when completely cold — a warm shell turns the custard thin and the pastry soft. The book gives no icing recipe here; a chocolate icing of this date would most likely be a simple water or milk glaze of icing sugar and melted chocolate rather than a modern ganache.
Choux paste reached North American cookbooks through French pâtisserie, and the éclair — French for "flash of lightning", a name traditionally explained by how quickly the pastry is eaten — was well established as a bakery item by the late nineteenth century. Its appearance in a milling company's promotional cookbook is telling: Five Roses, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, was distributed to Canadian households to show that a bag of ordinary household flour could handle the fancy work usually left to a confectioner.