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Cream for Eclairs
Rub, until smooth, two tablespoonfuls of flour in a little milk, and add, whilst stirring, one pint of boiling milk. Whisk three eggs, and add to them six ounces of sugar and the above, pour all into a saucepan and cook for five minutes, add one teaspoonful of butter and a saltspoonful of salt. When cool, flavor with almond, lemon or vanilla.
This is a plain pastry cream (crème pâtissière) built on whole eggs rather than yolks, thickened with a small amount of flour. It works, but it is slacker than modern versions and depends entirely on how you handle the eggs.
- Temper, do not dumpThe original already goes the safer way round, adding the hot milk-and-flour mixture to the whisked eggs and sugar rather than the reverse. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, then return everything to the pan over medium heat and keep whisking constantly; the scrambling risk is in the cooking, not the mixing.
- Five minutes means to a boilThe flour needs to reach a full bubbling boil for about a minute to thicken properly and to knock out the enzyme in egg yolk that would otherwise thin the cream on standing. Five minutes of steady whisking over medium heat is about right; do not stop stirring, especially at the corners of the pan.
- MeasurementsA saltspoonful is a quarter teaspoon. Six ounces of granulated sugar is about seven-eighths of a cup by volume, which is sweet by current taste; four ounces gives a less sweet cream. A pint here is 16 fl oz.
- It will be a soft creamTwo tablespoons of flour to a pint of milk is well below a modern pastry cream, though the three whole eggs add set of their own; expect something softer than the pipeable, spoon-standing filling of a modern éclair. If you want it to hold its shape in a split shell, use four tablespoons of flour or two of cornstarch.
- Whole eggsThis recipe uses three whole eggs rather than yolks, as a number of nineteenth-century versions do, giving a lighter, slightly more custard-like set with less richness. Six yolks in their place will give you the yellower, glossier cream of a contemporary patisserie.
- Cooling and skinPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface as it cools, or you will get a skin that lumps the finished cream. Chill fully before filling; flavor extracts go in once cool, as the original says, because heat drives off the aromatics.
- Almond flavoringUse a few drops only of modern almond extract — it is far stronger than most cooks expect, and a teaspoon will overwhelm a pint of cream. Lemon is better added as grated zest steeped in the hot milk and strained out.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups, enough to fill roughly a dozen to sixteen éclair shells.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was assembled from the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, and its pastry section reads like a set of shop notes: quantities in pints and ounces, no yields, no explanation, because the person reading it already knew what an éclair looked like. The cream itself is the standard French crème pâtissière, a flour-thickened egg custard that had been the backbone of European pastry work since at least the eighteenth century and reached American hotel kitchens with the French-trained chefs who staffed them. The éclair — the name is French for "flash of lightning," traditionally explained by how quickly the thing is eaten — is generally traced to Parisian pastry work of the mid-1800s and was thoroughly naturalized in America by the time Oscar was writing. The offhand "flavor with almond, lemon or vanilla" is a reminder that vanilla was still one option among several rather than the default it has since become.