Eclairs
7 tablespoons Mazola 1 cup boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt (scant) 1 scant cup flour 1 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 4 eggs Combine the water and Mazola in a saucepan, bring to boiling point, stir in the flour, salt, and cornstarch, mixed. The mixture will be very thick, and should be stirred rapidly until it forms a ball around the spoon. Cool five minutes, then stir in the eggs, one at a time. They should not be beaten. Oil a large baking pan with Mazola, put the mixture in it in strips about three and a half inches long and one inch wide. A pastry bag may be used for this purpose. Bake thirty minutes in a moderate oven, 350 degrees F. Cool, ice the top, split the side and fill with whipped cream or a Cooked Cream Filling. 1/2 cup Karo, Red Label 1¼ cups milk 1 egg 1/8 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon vanilla 2 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch Combine the Karo and milk, bring to boiling point and thicken with the cornstarch stirred smooth with the egg, salt, vanilla and an extra tablespoon of milk. Cook over hot water ten minutes, chill and use in eclairs, cream puffs or cream cake.
This is pâte à choux built on corn oil rather than butter — a house style for a cookbook published to sell Mazola, Argo and Karo. It works, but a few of the directions need translating.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cool itStir the flour mixture over heat until it gathers into a ball that pulls from the pan sides — that step drives off water and sets the starch. The five-minute rest matters just as much: eggs added to a scalding paste will scramble.
- Mazola means corn oilAny neutral vegetable oil gives the same result. Oil contains no water, unlike butter, so the paste will feel stiffer than you may expect.
- "1 scant cup flour"Read this as just under a level cup, roughly 4 ounces of all-purpose flour. Combined with the tablespoon of cornstarch it lowers the effective protein a little, which is why these bake tender rather than leathery.
- Eggs, unbeaten, one at a timeEach egg goes in whole rather than pre-beaten, which lets you judge when the paste reaches a thick, glossy, slowly-falling consistency. If your eggs are large, the fourth may not all be needed.
- Oven temperatureThe book says 'a moderate oven, 350 degrees F.' That will produce a pale, softer shell. Many modern bakers start choux at 400-425F for the first 10-15 minutes to force the steam rise, then drop to 350F to dry it out. Either way, do not open the door in the first 20 minutes.
- Knowing when they are doneThirty minutes is a minimum. The shells should be deep golden and feel light and hollow; underbaked choux collapses on the cooling rack. Piercing each end with a knife tip after baking lets steam escape.
- Karo Red LabelKaro was sold in more than one grade, and Red Label is generally described as the darker syrup, with Blue Label the light one. Dark corn syrup is the closest current substitute; light corn syrup will give a paler filling.
- The cooked fillingThe cornstarch is stirred smooth with the egg, salt, vanilla and an extra tablespoon of milk, then added to the boiling syrup and milk; pour it in slowly while stirring. The ten minutes over hot water cooks out the starch and sets the egg, and the custard should coat a spoon thickly.
- Yield and storageThe recipe gives no yield; strips three and a half inches by one inch from this quantity should make a dozen or more, with filling to match. Fill them the day they are eaten, and refrigerate anything filled with whipped cream or the cooked custard.
The éclair is a piped, filled version of pâte à choux, the cooked-paste dough that French pastry cooks were working with well before the nineteenth century; the name means "lightning" or "flash," and the usual explanation offered is that the pastries are eaten in one. What makes this particular version worth reading is not the pastry but the branding. Mazola, Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, and Karo syrup were all products of the Corn Products Refining Company, and books like this one were published to teach American home cooks that corn oil could stand in for butter and lard, corn syrup for sugar, and cornstarch for part of the flour. The result is a genuine test of the premise: choux is a dough that depends entirely on fat, starch and egg behaving correctly, and rewriting it in corn products is a fair demonstration that they do.