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Dessert

Queen Eclairs

A puffed pastry made from a stiff dough of water, butter, flour, eggs, and leavening, filled with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream 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 ↓

Queen Eclairs

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the paste

  1. Boil the water and butter together.

  2. Stir in the flour and salt until the mixture forms a stiff paste and pulls away from the sides of the saucepan.

  3. Cool slightly.

Mix and shape

  1. Mix the cream of tartar and baking soda with the eggs and beat until combined.

  2. Add the egg mixture to the paste and beat well.

  3. Place the mixture on greased baking sheets in finger-sized pieces.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake at 300°F (150°C) until light and puffed.

  2. Cool the eclairs.

  3. Make an incision in the side of each eclair and fill with whipped cream, custard, or jelly. Ice if desired.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Flour + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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

Flour
Starch that gelatinizes with the hot water and butter to form the stiff paste that holds the shape.
Eggs
Add moisture and structure, and their proteins set during baking to hold the puffed shell.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the paste.
Baking soda
Releases gas in the batter to help the eclairs rise and puff.
Cream of tartar
Acid that stabilizes the beaten egg mixture and works with the baking soda in rising.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and salt until a stiff paste forms. The paste must be cooked and stiff enough before the eggs are added. If it is too wet, the eclairs will spread and fail to hold their shape or puff properly.

“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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