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Chocolate Eclairs

Chocolate eclairs are baked pastry filled with cream and glazed with chocolate icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Chocolate and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,404 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Chocolate Eclairs

Oven, in the book's wordsA rather cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the eclairs

  1. Prepare the batter for the eclairs as directed for Cream Cakes, placing it on a baking pan in strips 3 inches long and 1.5 inches wide.

  2. Bake until golden and let cool.

Fill and ice

  1. Fill the cooled eclairs with Pastry Cooks' Cream.

  2. Boil 4 ounces of sugar and ½ cup of water until it reaches the 'crack' stage. Test by dipping a stick into the boiling sugar and then into cold water; it should form a clear, brittle candy.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in 1 ounce of finely grated chocolate.

  4. Brush the eclairs with the icing and dry them in a cool oven before serving.

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. Chocolate + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + chocolatetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,994 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the batter's shape while it bakes.
Eggs
Add structure and lift to the batter as it bakes and sets.
Sugar
Forms the clear, brittle candy that makes up the icing.
Finely grated chocolate
Adds chocolate flavour and colour to the icing.

The step that matters

Testing the sugar to the 'crack' stage. Sugar syrup darkens and hardens quickly near this point, so removing it from heat too late can make the icing brittle and bitter, while too early leaves it soft and runny.

“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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