A Dessert Worth Tasting Twice: coffee éclairs
The last issue of PST contained no piece on food; I made up for it with a lengthy article about cafés and restaurants. As I neared the completion of this issue, I wanted to do something foodie, but what? It would have to be quick to make and inexpensive. Boeuf a la mode was out of the question in spite of the fact that the political incorrectness of other things in this issue begged for red meat.
The monthly writers group was going to be meeting at MPSGHQ last night, and since I always try to regale them with something, it might as well be a Proustian dish. In this way I could write about the food and the group at the same time. At the last minute, after long debate over what would be the least expensive dish to make, I decided on the coffee éclairs Marcel was eating when he finally met Albertine.
"When Elstir asked me to come with him so that he might introduce me to Albertine, who was sitting a little further down the room, I first of all finished eating a coffee eclair and, with a show of keen interest, asked an old gentleman...to tell me about the old Norman fairs.""
The éclair, that phallic take on the cream puff, is not unknown to me. I have dealt with pate a choux many times, and knew what was in store: a process that requires considerable upper arm strength unless one is in possession of a dough hook on an electric mixer, which I am not. On the other hand, I did have all the ingredients except the cream, and the budgetary constraints would just have to be supplemented with grueling physical labor. I took this recipe from Dining With Marcel Proust by Shirley King, but altered it slightly, omitting uncooked egg white and adding a wee bit more sugar to the cream filling.
Eclair au Café
- Choux paste:
- 1 1/4 cups water
- 1 stick butter, cut in pieces
- 1 1/4 cups flour
- pinch of salt
- 4 small eggs OR 3 1/2 large eggs
Filling:
- 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
- 1 Tbs. strong coffee, sweetened with
Icing:
- 1/2 cup powdered sugar
- 1 Tbs. strong coffee
Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put the water and butter in a smallish heavy pot and bring it to a boil until the butter is melted. Throw in the flour and salt all at once and beat it furiously until it has turned into a solid mass that leaves the sides of the pot. Remove it from the heat immediately and transfer it into a deep bowl. Now the fun begins.
Beat in the eggs one at a time. Do not add another egg until you've thoroughly incorporated the one before. I know strong men who flag by the fourth egg, unless they have one of those swell dough hooks. I was very lucky to have one of my housemates, Miss Jenny, in the kitchen while I was undergoing this ordeal, and she took a couple of turns at beating in the eggs, and held the bowl down while I stirred. The problem is that this dough cannot be beaten too much, and the pleasure in the result is in direct proportion to the pain of the process.
When the last egg has disappeared and the ball of dough is a shiny mass, load it into a pastry bag fitted with a 1/2" tip, or just use a teaspoon and your fingers to make 3" long strips of dough on a baking sheet. Bake them for twenty minutes. Remove them from the oven, cut a slit along the side of each to allow the steam to escape, turn off the oven and put the pan back in for another 15 minutes. Remove the pastry shells from the oven and let them cool.
While they are cooling, make some espresso and get out two small bowls. In one, mix 1 Tbs. espresso and 1-2 Tbs. powdered sugar. Into the other mix 1/2 cup of powdered sugar with 1 Tbs. espresso. The second mixture will be thick.
Beat the cream until it is stiff and add the coffee with the smaller amount of sugar. The cream filling should not be too sweet. As I was doing this part of the proceedings I thought about the upper arm strength of the Belle époque cook. This dish was literally whipped up as the finale to a beautiful meal without the assistance of the mixer. No wonder Francoise was cranky.
Cut the cooled pastry shells horizontally and scrape out any globs of dough, leaving only the crisp outside. With a teaspoon, fill the pastries and scrape off any cream sticking out when the shells are reassembled. With another spoon, heap a bit of the icing mixture on the top of each one and spread it evenly around.
The éclairs were finished and laid out on a doilied tray just as the first of the writers arrived. The tray was placed in a tableau on the kitchen table and my roommate Jason began to draw them for me. We are all mesmerized somehow by the presence of artists in action, and so for once, the writers congregated around the kitchen table instead of in the back parlor where my collection of Proust portraits lines the mantle. Jason drew meticulously and slowly as the writers eyed the éclairs, contenting themselves with the usual excesses of wine, words and smoke. Only one member, the only non-smoker, could not deny the need for oral gratification and snatched one from the tray. I fumed and reassembled the remaining ones to maintain the visual composition. We suggested he read what he'd written this last month so he would be able to ignore the pastries more easily.
The comments were made regarding his progress and the second writer read us her work for the month. By the end of the chapter, the drawing was done and the éclairs were fair game. They disappeared in minutes. The writers exercised their vocabularies with variations of my own comment ("pretty damn good") and finished off the wine.
Soon thereafter, one of the lightweight writers excused herself and dived into the bathroom off the kitchen. Moments later we could not help but notice the sounds, the hurling of wretched excess. One might have felt complete sympathy for her plight were it not for one decided advantage: she got to taste the éclairs twice.
This was a dessert so good that it gave me an entirely new take on the narrator Marcel putting off the introduction to Albertine. "I first of all finished eating a coffee éclair, " Proust wrote. First of all indeed. This is a taste treat so delicious as to completely absorb the eater's thoughts. It was not merely that he was trying to be coy and keep Albertine waiting; the pastry dominated him completely for a few minutes. The conversation he was having might have been finished for effect, but the coffee éclair was, at that point, more compelling than Albertine.
