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Eclairs Aux Fraises
Place twenty-four well-picked and washed fresh strawberries in a bowl with one tablespoon fine sugar and one tablespoon Swiss kirschwasser; mix well and keep in a cool place until required.
Prepare six eclairs Chantilly. Arrange four strawberries in each cake with the whipped cream. Dredge a little fine sugar over and serve.
This is an assembly recipe: it assumes you already have the éclair shells and the Chantilly cream from elsewhere in the book. Everything that matters happens in the last ten minutes before serving.
- What "éclairs Chantilly" meansBaked choux paste shells split and filled with sweetened whipped cream — not pastry cream, not icing. The recipe gives no oven instruction; if you are baking the shells yourself, choux wants a hot oven to rise and then a slacker one to dry out fully, or it will collapse.
- KirschwasserA clear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit, stones included, which gives it the faint almond note. Substituting cherry liqueur or maraschino changes the dish, as those are sweet.
- Maceration time"Keep in a cool place until required" sets no time; a short maceration — perhaps half an hour to an hour — is enough. Left much longer the strawberries go slack and give up syrup, which will soak the choux.
- Fine sugarCaster sugar, finer than granulated but not powdered. Granulated dissolves more slowly into the berries; pulse it briefly in a grinder if that is all you have.
- DredgePeriod usage for dusting from above through a sieve or shaker, not coating heavily. Confectioners' sugar is the usual modern choice for the finish because it stays visible.
- Assemble at the last momentFilled choux softens quickly, and macerated fruit accelerates it. Fill the shells, set the berries, dust, and take them to the table.
- YieldSix éclairs, four strawberries each — one per person as a light dessert course.
Éclairs belong to the nineteenth-century French pâtisserie repertoire built on choux paste, a dough generally traced to sixteenth-century Italian cooks in France and refined by Parisian pastry houses; the name, meaning "flash of lightning," is often said to refer to how quickly they are eaten. Crème Chantilly — sweetened whipped cream — carries the name of the château north of Paris, an attribution that is traditional rather than documented. This book's habit of building one recipe on top of another, so that "eclairs aux fraises" is really three instructions long, assumes a kitchen where the shells and the cream would already be standing ready. The insistence on Swiss kirschwasser is of its period too: this was before appellation law, and the kirsch of Switzerland and the Black Forest was held to be the benchmark.