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Vanilla Eclairs
Prepare the eclairs exactly the same as chocolate eclairs substituting a glace vanilla for the chocolate.
This is a variant entry: it sends you back to the book's chocolate eclair recipe and changes only the finish. Everything worth saying here concerns the two things the original leaves implicit — the choux paste and what a period cook meant by a "glace."
- Find the parent recipe firstNothing here works without the chocolate eclair entry, which carries the choux paste (pâte à choux), the piping, the baking and the filling. This page changes the icing and nothing else.
- "Glace vanilla"In this context a glace is an icing rather than ice cream, and not a glaze in the meat sense. For eclairs it would most likely be a warmed fondant or a simple water icing of sifted confectioners' sugar, a spoonful of hot water or cream, and vanilla, thinned until it coats the back of a spoon.
- Oven heatThe original gives none; this page defers entirely to the parent recipe. As modern working guidance, choux wants a hot start and a drier finish: around 425F for the first 10-12 minutes to force the steam and lift the shells, then about 350F for another 20-25 minutes until they are deep gold and light in the hand.
- Do not open the door earlyShells peeked at before the walls have set are apt to collapse and are hard to recover. Split or pierce them as they come out so trapped steam escapes and the interiors dry.
- VanillaA period kitchen used vanilla extract or a sugar-cured bean. About half a teaspoon of extract per cup of icing sugar is a reasonable proportion; scraped bean seeds look handsome but flavour the icing more faintly than they appear to.
- The fillingPeriod eclairs were filled with pastry cream or whipped cream. Either one makes the pastry a refrigerated item — fill no more than a few hours before serving, and keep filled eclairs cold rather than on a sideboard.
- YieldNo quantities are given here; they come from the parent recipe. A typical choux batch of about a cup of flour and four eggs would pipe roughly 12 to 16 four-inch eclairs. Pipe them well apart; they expand considerably.
Eclairs belong to the nineteenth-century French repertoire built on pâte à choux, the cooked flour-and-butter paste that rises on its own steam, and the name — French for "lightning" or "flash" — is usually explained by how quickly the pastry is eaten, though that account is traditional rather than documented. By the time this book appeared, eclairs had passed from the pâtissier's window into the American and English household manual, which is why the entry is so brief: the compiler assumes the reader already has the chocolate version and needs only to be told that the same shells and cream take a vanilla finish. Stacking variants on one parent recipe was a common economy in printed cookbooks, where a single choux formula could be spun into eclairs, cream puffs, profiteroles and savoury cases.