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Batons De Jakob
(Marseilles.) Melt 1/2 cup of butter in 1 cup of hot water, and stir till it boils; add 1 cup of flour, and stir till smooth. Take off, add 3 unbeaten eggs, one by one, and stir well. Pour on a pan in cakes, 1 inch wide and 4 long; bake 25 minutes in moderate oven. When cold, open them with a knife, fill with a soft custard flavored with vanilla, and ice with coffee.
This is standard pâte à choux baked as fingers — an éclair by another name. The proportions are sound; the oven instruction is the weak point.
- The hinge: dry the paste, then cool itAfter the flour goes in, keep stirring over heat until the paste pulls away from the pan sides and leaves a thin film on the bottom, about 2 minutes. Then let it cool for 3-4 minutes before the eggs go in, or they will scramble.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F, which may be too gentle for a good lift. A hotter start -- about 425F for 12-15 minutes to build steam, then dropping to 350F until the shells are deep gold and rigid -- gives better results, though that runs past the 25 minutes the recipe allows. Pale choux collapse.
- Eggs one at a timeThree eggs is a guide, not a law. The paste should fall from the spoon in a thick, glossy ribbon; if the third egg makes it slack, hold back part of it. Older eggs and modern large eggs differ enough to matter.
- Piping the batons"Pour on a pan" is optimistic — the paste is too stiff to pour. Pipe or spoon 4-inch lengths on parchment, well apart, and expect them to roughly double.
- Vent themThe recipe has you split the cooled shells with a knife, which is the right method, but pierce each baton the moment it leaves the oven so trapped steam escapes. Otherwise the insides stay damp.
- The custard"A soft custard" in this period usually means a stirred boiled custard rather than a flour-thickened pastry cream, though a pastry cream -- egg yolks, sugar, milk and a little flour or cornstarch, cooked through and flavoured with vanilla -- holds better inside the shells. Either way it must be fully cooked and refrigerated, and filled shells should be eaten the same day.
- Coffee icingNo formula is given: about 1 cup confectioners' sugar moistened with 1-2 tablespoons strong cooled coffee, thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Brush or dip the tops.
- YieldRoughly 12 to 16 four-inch batons, depending on how generously they are piped.
Bâtons de Jacob -- Jacob's staffs -- is a French pastry-trade name for a filled choux finger; the name is popularly linked to the biblical staff or ladder, though this is tradition rather than documented etymology. They appear in French pastry alongside éclairs and salambos (the latter a later nineteenth-century item), distinguished mainly by filling and glaze, and a coffee icing over vanilla cream, as here, is one of the familiar pairings. The "(Marseilles.)" heading suggests a recipe attributed to a particular city rather than a codified pâtissier's formula, which would account for the loose instructions -- "pour on a pan," "a soft custard" -- that assume a cook who already knows what a custard is and how thick a choux paste ought to be.