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Chocolate éClairs
Prepare batter as for Cream Puffs. Spread the batter on the baking pan in long ovals, and bake in a quick oven twenty minutes. When done, split with a sharp knife, and fill with cream as for Puffs. Cover with plain or chocolate frosting.
A cross-reference recipe: everything hinges on the cream puff batter (pâte à choux) elsewhere in the book. The instructions here are only the shaping, baking and filling.
- "A quick oven"In period usage roughly 400-425F. Many modern bakers start eclairs hot to get the steam lift, then drop to about 350F to dry the shells through; twenty minutes at a constant high heat may give colour while leaving the interior damp.
- Spreading versus pipingThe recipe has you spread the batter in long ovals rather than pipe it. A bag with a large plain or star tip gives straighter shells about 4 to 5 inches long; two spoons will work but the shapes will be irregular and may bake unevenly.
- Do not open the ovenChoux rises on steam alone. Opening the door in the first fifteen minutes collapses the shells, and they will not recover.
- Judging donenessThe shells should be deep golden and feel light and hollow, not merely set. Underbaked choux slumps as it cools. Some bakers pierce each shell with a skewer at the end of baking and return them to a turned-off oven for five minutes to dry.
- "Fill with cream as for Puffs"In a book of this date this usually means a cooked pastry cream (milk, sugar, eggs, flour or cornstarch, vanilla) rather than whipped cream, though both were used. Either works; a cooked custard filling must be chilled promptly and the finished eclairs kept refrigerated.
- SplittingSplit while still warm enough to release trapped steam but fill only when completely cold, or the cream will thin and soak the shell. Filled éclairs are at their best within a few hours.
- Chocolate frostingPeriod "chocolate frosting" was usually a confectioners' sugar glaze with melted unsweetened chocolate, not a ganache. A simple glaze of powdered sugar, cocoa or melted chocolate, butter and hot water sets firm enough to stack.
- YieldA standard choux batter using 1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour and 4 eggs makes roughly 12 to 15 éclairs of this size.
The éclair is generally traced to French pastry work of the nineteenth century, and is often credited in popular accounts to the circle of Antonin Carême, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. The name means "flash" or "lightning" in French, variously explained as a reference to the glossy glaze or to how quickly the thing is eaten. By the time Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf book appeared, éclairs had become a fixture of American bakeries and ladies' luncheons, and this book treats them as a shape variation on cream puffs rather than a separate recipe, since the batter, the filling and the technique are identical.