Chocolate Icing
2 tablespoons melted chocolate 5 tablespoons powdered sugar 3 tablespoons boiling water Cook over the fire until smooth and glossy; dip the tops of eclairs in this as they come from the oven.
A three-ingredient glaze that depends entirely on cooking it just long enough to thicken without seizing. The proportions are workable but very loose by modern standards.
- The hingeCook it only until it is smooth and glossy, as the recipe says; heat drives off water and the mixture thickens fast at the end. Pull it off the heat while it still flows, since it stiffens as it cools.
- "Melted chocolate""Melted chocolate" -- In this period the term means unsweetened baking chocolate, sold in cakes and melted over hot water. Two tablespoons melted is roughly an ounce to an ounce and a half of solid chocolate. Modern semisweet chips will make a much sweeter, softer glaze.
- Powdered sugarThen as now this is finely ground sugar, though period versions often contained no cornstarch. Modern confectioners' sugar contains roughly 3 percent cornstarch, which may thicken the icing a little faster.
- QuantityAs written this yields about a third of a cup — enough for six to eight small éclairs. Double it if you are glazing a full tray.
- Heat level "Over the fire" means direct low heat on the range. Chocolate scorches easily at this scale; a heavy small saucepan over the lowest flame, stirred constantly, is closer to what the original intends than a bare pan over high heat.
- Dipping hotThe instruction to dip éclairs as they come from the oven works because warm shells help the glaze flow thin. It also traps steam under the icing. Cooling the shells first gives a crisper result, at the cost of a slightly thicker coat.
- If it seizesOverheating, which crystallises the sugar, will make the mixture grainy or dull. A teaspoon of boiling water beaten in off the heat will usually bring back the gloss.
Gold Medal Flour's cookbooks were promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby Company of Minneapolis, given away or sold cheaply to put the brand in American kitchens, and their recipes tend to be terse — written for cooks who already knew the shape of the work and only needed proportions. This icing belongs to the era when éclairs and cream puffs had moved out of professional pastry shops and into the ambitious home baker's repertoire, largely through the influence of cooking-school teachers like Fannie Farmer and Sarah Tyson Rorer. A boiled water-and-sugar chocolate glaze of this kind is the plainest ancestor of what pastry cooks now call a simple chocolate fondant: no butter, no cream, no corn syrup, just enough sugar in solution to set with a shine. Chocolate itself was still generally bought unsweetened in cakes and grated or melted as needed, which is why so many recipes of the period specify a volume of melted chocolate rather than a weight of the bar.