No. 3303

Eclairs, Coffee and Chocolate Cream

Eclairs au Cafe ou au Chocolat

Put into a saucepan one pint of water, a pint of milk, half a pound of butter, two ounces of sugar and some salt; place it on the fire. When the liquid begins to boil remove the saucepan and incorporate into it a pound of sifted flour, mixing it in quickly with a spatula; return the saucepan to the fire and continue to work the paste vigorously for a few moments in order to dry and have it smooth, and when it detaches from the bottom of the saucepan take it off the fire and leave it for a second to fall below boiling heat, then incorporate into it slowly two whole eggs, stirring in well with the spatula. As these are well mixed add two more, and continue this operation until the paste has absorbed fourteen or sixteen eggs. With this paste fill three-quarters full a linen pocket furnished with a three-eighths of an inch diameter socket (Fig. 179), and lay the eclairs through it three and a half inches long, at short distances from each other, on a lightly buttered baking sheet; egg over the tops and cook them in a slow oven. When done take them from the baking sheet and split them through the sides, either with a small knife or a pair of scissors, and fill them up with vanilla pastry cream (No. 46). Immediately dip them to half their depth into chocolate or coffee icing (No. 99) and lay them on a wire grate to drain and dry the icing. Place an instant at the oven door to gloss.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's choux paste is sound but built for a hotel pastry department: a pound of flour and up to sixteen eggs will give you something like five dozen éclairs. Scale it to a quarter for a home batch.

The hinge: dry the paste, then judge by textureThe paste must be worked on the heat until a film forms and it pulls cleanly from the pan, and the eggs must go in gradually while it is warm but no longer near boiling. Fourteen to sixteen eggs is a range because the finished paste should fall from the spatula in a thick, glossy ribbon; stop adding eggs when it does, whatever the count.
Quarter batch1/2 cup water, 1/2 cup milk, 2 oz butter, 1 tablespoon sugar, a pinch of salt, 4 oz (about 1 cup) flour by weight, and roughly 4 large eggs added one at a time. Nineteenth-century eggs ran smaller than today's large, another reason to go by consistency.
"A slow oven" is not how choux is baked nowRanhofer's ovens, unlike a thermostatted one, would not have held a single steady heat through a bake, and it is not certain how hot his "slow" was. Modern practice starts hot to force the steam that hollows the shells — around 400-425F — then drops to about 350F to dry them through. A genuinely low, steady oven gives pale, collapsed éclairs.
Don't open the door earlyBaked 25-35 minutes depending on size, and they should be deeply golden and light when lifted. A shell pulled while still blond will sink; if in doubt, leave it another five minutes.
Linen pocket and socketA canvas or linen piping bag with a 3/8-inch plain round tip. Fill three-quarters full as directed; an overfull bag is unmanageable.
Cross-referencesNo. 46 is Ranhofer's vanilla pastry cream and No. 99 his icing; the recipe does not describe it, but a period sugar icing rather than a modern ganache glaze is what is meant. Any good crème pâtissière and a coffee or chocolate fondant will do.
The gloss at the oven doorA few seconds of gentle heat sets the fondant to a shine. Longer and it slumps off the shell — treat it as a flash, not a bake.
YieldThe full recipe makes roughly 60-70 éclairs at three and a half inches. Shells are best filled the day they are baked; unfilled, they keep overnight and can be crisped briefly in a warm oven.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, which is why this entry sits in a numbered system that cross-refers to a pastry cream and an icing elsewhere in the book. The paste itself is pâte à choux, generally traced to Italian cooks working in sixteenth-century France and codified in the nineteenth century by pastry chefs including Antonin Carême, whose kitchen vocabulary Ranhofer inherited. The name éclair — French for lightning or flash — is usually explained by how quickly the things are eaten, though no early source confirms it. Coffee and chocolate were a common pair of fondant flavors for the shape, and the placement here among "Small Cakes for Entremets" reflects a period service order in which such pastries arrived as a sweet course before dessert proper.