Home › Recipes › Corn Starch Cream Puffs
Corn Starch Cream Puffs
Finest. The name, eclair, is probably from the French word signifying a gap or clear place. These became eclairs au chocolat, or au cafe, according to the cream used for filling. Petits-ehaux a la comtesse are small puffs dipped in chocolate icing and the coating dried on them before serving. 1 pint of milk. 6 ounces of butter. 8 ounces of corn starch. 10 eggs. Boil half the milk with the butter in it. Mix the starch with the other half. Pour both together and cook to a smooth paste. Add the eggs one at a time--after removing from the fire and allowing the paste to fall below boiling heat--and beat thoroughly. The pieces of paste dropped on the baking pans should not be larger than guinea eggs. Makes 50.
This is choux paste with cornstarch standing in for flour, so all the lift and structure come from steam and egg. The original assumes a bakeshop hand who already knows how choux behaves, and it gives no oven temperature at all.
- The hinge: egg temperatureThe paste must fall below boiling before the eggs go in, as the recipe says, and in practice you want it closer to 140F than to 190F. Too hot and the egg sets in threads instead of emulsifying, and the puffs will not rise.
- Oven heat, which the recipe omitsChoux needs a hot start to generate steam: 425F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 350F for another 20-25 minutes to dry the shells through. Do not open the door during the first stage.
- Weights, not volumesThis is a professional book and the ounces are weights. Eight ounces of cornstarch is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups by volume, and 6 ounces of butter is a stick and a half. A pint is 2 cups.
- Cornstarch behaves differently from flourThere is no gluten here, so the paste sets by gelatinized starch alone. Cook it hard over the heat, stirring, until it forms a single smooth mass that pulls cleanly from the pan sides, or the shells will be slack and heavy.
- Ten eggs is a guide, not a ruleEgg sizes were not standardised as they are now, so the count may not translate exactly. Add them one at a time and stop when the paste falls from the spoon in a thick ribbon with a slight V; you may need only eight or nine modern large eggs.
- Guinea eggsA guinea fowl egg is noticeably smaller than a hen's, roughly 1 3/4 inches long. Pipe or drop mounds of roughly 1 1/4 inches for the stated yield of 50.
- Filling and finishingSplit or pierce the shells as soon as they come out so steam escapes, and cool completely before filling. The eclair variants named at the top are simply the same paste piped in fingers and filled with chocolate or coffee pastry cream.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant bakeshops rather than home kitchens, which is why the quantities arrive in shop weights and the yield is fifty. The etymology offered here is doubtful: eclair is normally traced to the French for a flash of lightning, from eclairer, to light, with the usual traditional explanation being that the pastry is eaten in a flash. What is genuinely of the period is the cornstarch. Commercial corn starch manufacture expanded rapidly in the United States after the mid-1800s, and American cookbooks of the following decades are full of substitutions of it for wheat flour in creams, puddings and pastes, partly for economy and partly for the lighter, cleaner texture it gave.