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Chocolate Eclairs
Prepare a pate-a-choux. Slide a tube one-third of an inch in diameter to the bottom of a pastry bag. Have a clean pastry pan ready. Drop the paste into the bag and press down in shapes three inches long by half an inch wide. Set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove and let cool for ten minutes. Make an incision lengthwise in each eclair at one side only, then fill the aperture with a creme patissiere; place them on a grill with a pan underneath, carefully pour a glace au chocolate over the top of the eclairs, let cool off, dress on a dish with a folded napkin and serve.
This is a professional shorthand entry: it assumes you already have pâte à choux, crème pâtissière and a chocolate glaze in hand from elsewhere in the book. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, which is never stated, and the piping details.
- The missing oven temperatureChoux needs an initial blast to create steam and lift, then a longer dry-out. Start at 425F for the first 10 minutes, drop to 350F for the remainder, and expect closer to 30-35 minutes total for éclairs of this size rather than the twenty given.
- Do not open the door earlyThis is the hinge of the whole recipe. Éclairs collapse if the door is opened before the walls have set and dried; they should be deep gold and feel light and hollow before they leave the oven.
- Tube sizeA third of an inch is roughly 8-9 mm, which is a standard plain round piping tip. A fluted tip is also often used, on the argument that the ridges help the shells expand evenly and crack less.
- Size and yieldThree inches by half an inch is small by today's standards; commercial eclairs now often run four to five inches. The recipe gives no quantities of its own; a typical modern batch of choux (1 cup water, 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour, 4 eggs) will pipe roughly a dozen and a half at this smaller size, depending on how generously they are piped.
- Cooling before fillingTen minutes is not enough. Warm shells steam the pastry cream and go soft; cool them completely on a rack, and pierce or slit them as soon as they come out so trapped steam escapes.
- FillingThe lengthwise slit is the older method and still works with a spoon or a small piping bag. Filling through two holes poked in the base keeps the shell tidier if you prefer.
- "Glace au chocolat"Here glace means a poured icing, not ice cream. Classic versions used fondant thinned over warm water and coloured or flavoured with melted chocolate; a modern chocolate glaze will pour the same way over the grill-and-drip-pan setup described, though a ganache sets thicker.
- ServingDressing on a folded napkin was a standard presentation convention of the period, and would also have kept the eclairs from sliding on the dish. Serve the same day, as filled choux softens within hours.
Éclair means "flash" or "lightning" in French, a name usually explained by how quickly the pastry is eaten, though that is a traditional gloss rather than a documented origin. The pastry itself descends from pâte à choux, a paste cooked on the stove before baking that was well established in French professional kitchens by the early nineteenth century and is generally associated with the pastry chefs of Antonin Carême's generation; the éclair as a chocolate-glazed, cream-filled finger appears in French pastry manuals by the later 1800s. Its presence in an early twentieth-century American book called an "international" cook book is telling: the entry is written in kitchen French, with pâte à choux, crème pâtissière and glace au chocolat all left untranslated, on the assumption that a cook aspiring to serve fashionable desserts would either know the terms or look them up in the same volume.