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Dessert

Chocolate Eclairs

A pastry made from a light batter baked into eclair shapes and coated with chocolate.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Chocolate Eclairs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Weigh the eggs and use the same weight in sugar and half that weight in flour.

  3. Mix the flour with cream of tartar and baking soda thoroughly.

  4. Drop a spoonful of butter into each compartment of a pan or use a well-buttered, paper-lined pan.

Make and bake the batter

  1. Beat the egg yolks until light, then gradually add the sugar.

  2. Fold in the beaten egg whites alternately with the flour mixture.

  3. Shape the mixture to be nearly the size of ladyfingers.

  4. Bake until light and done, then remove from the oven.

Finish

  1. Pair two eclairs together, allow to cool, and cover with chocolate.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Cream + chocolatetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + chocolatetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whites trap air when beaten, giving the light, airy structure of the eclairs.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps stabilise the beaten egg yolks.
All-purpose flour
Provides the starch that sets the batter and gives it body as it bakes.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the egg whites, helping them whip to a more stable foam.
Baking soda
Reacts with acid in the batter to produce gas that helps the mixture rise.
Chocolate
Forms a sweet, glossy coating that adds flavour and fat to the finished eclairs.

The step that matters

Folding the whites into the flour mixture. Folding gently preserves the air whipped into the egg whites. Stirring or deflating them makes the batter dense and flat-textured after baking.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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