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Strawberry Eclairs
Boil together in a saucepan one cup of boiling water, one-fourth cup of butter and a speck of salt. As it begins to boil stir in one cup of sifted flour. Stir constantly until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan and cleaves together in a ball.
When partly cool add four eggs, beating them in one at a time. Drop carefully in long narrow strips, some distance apart, on buttered tins, and bake in a moderate oven until well risen-about thirty minutes. Leave the oven door open a few minutes before removing the eclairs, to prevent their falling. When they are cool split one side, fill with sweetened strawberries or jam. Spread with boiled icing colored with strawberry juice. Annabel Lee.
Standard pâte à choux with a fruit filling. The dough behaves the same today; the vague parts are oven heat, pan size and how long the filled shells will hold.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage "moderate" is roughly 350-375F. Modern choux practice starts hotter, around 375-400F for the first 15 minutes to drive the steam that lifts the shells, then drops to 350F for the remainder; held at a flat 350F the shells may come out pale and damp.
- The hinge: dry the pasteKeep stirring over heat until the ball pulls cleanly from the pan and leaves a thin film on the bottom, roughly two minutes. Underdried paste carries too much water and the shells collapse no matter how well they rise.
- Egg by feel, not by countFour eggs suits the modern large egg reasonably well, but beat in the last one gradually and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick, glossy V. "Partly cool" means warm but no longer hot -- cool enough not to scramble the egg.
- Buttered tinsParchment is better than butter here. Greased sheets let the piped strips spread and slide; parchment holds the shape and needs no fat.
- Piping and sizeA plain half-inch tip, strips four to five inches long, two inches apart. The batch makes roughly 10-12 eclairs.
- The open oven doorThe intent is to let steam escape and set the crust before the shells hit cool air. Modern practice is the same idea done more thoroughly: pierce each shell at one end and return it to the turned-off oven for 5-10 minutes to dry the interior.
- Boiled icingA cooked sugar syrup beaten into egg white, the period's standard soft frosting. It contains uncooked white; a fondant or a confectioners' sugar glaze thinned with strawberry juice gives the same colour without it.
- Fill lateSweetened fresh strawberries weep. Split and fill no more than an hour before serving, or use jam if the eclairs must stand.
Choux paste is a long-established French pastry, and the éclair in its finished form spread through American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, usually filled with pastry cream or whipped cream and glazed with chocolate. A strawberry version like this one fits the domestic-science era's habit of ringing changes on a known base: the same paste yields cream puffs, éclairs, or the small savory cases sometimes called patty shells. The signature at the end, Annabel Lee, suggests a reader contribution rather than a staff recipe, a common feature of period magazine cookery columns, whose instructions vary in precision from one page to the next.