An éclair is a pastry

Pastry

Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked products made from ingredients such as flour, sugar, milk, butter, shortening, baking powder and/or eggs. Small cakes, tarts and other sweet baked products are called "pastries."...

 made with choux

Choux pastry

Choux pastry, or pâte à choux , is a light pastry dough used to make profiteroles, croquembouches, éclairs, French crullers, beignets, St. Honoré cake, Indonesian kue sus, and gougères. It contains only butter, water, flour, and eggs...

 dough filled with a cream and topped with icing.

The dough, which is the same as that used for profiterole, is piped into an oblong shape with a pastry bag

Pastry bag

A pastry bag is an often cone- or triangular-shaped, hand-held bag made from cloth, paper, or plastic that is used to pipe semi-solid foods by pressing them through a narrow opening at one end, for many purposes including cake decoration...

 and baked until it is crisp and hollow inside. Once cool, the pastry then is filled with a coffee- or chocolate-flavoured pastry cream (crème pâtissière), custard

Custard

Custard is a variety of culinary preparations based on a cooked mixture of milk or cream and egg yolk. Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce , to a thick pastry cream used to fill éclairs. The most common custards are used as...

, whipped cream

Whipped cream

Whipped cream is cream that has been beaten by a mixer, whisk, or fork until it is light and fluffy. Whipped cream is often sweetened and sometimes flavored with vanilla, in which case it may be called Chantilly cream or crème Chantilly ....

, or chiboust cream

Chiboust cream

Crème Chiboust is a crème pâtissière lightened with whipped cream or stiffly beaten egg whites.Crème Chiboust can be flavoured with vanilla, orange zest, or liqueurs. Mixed with fruit, it becomes crème plombières....

; and iced with fondant

Fondant

Fondant is one of several kinds of icing-like substance used to decorate or sculpt pastries. The word, in French, means "melting", coming from the same root as "foundry" in English....

 icing. Other fillings include pistachio

Pistachio

The pistachio, Pistacia vera in the Anacardiaceae family, is a small tree originally from Persia , which now can also be found in regions of Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, India, Pakistan, Egypt, Sicily and possibly Afghanistan , as well as in the United States,...

- and rum

Rum

Rum is a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane by-products such as molasses, or directly from sugarcane juice, by a process of fermentation and distillation. The distillate, a clear liquid, is then usually aged in oak barrels...

-flavoured custard, fruit

Fruit

In broad terms, a fruit is a structure of a plant that contains its seeds.The term has different meanings dependent on context. In non-technical usage, such as food preparation, fruit normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of certain plants that are sweet and edible in the raw state,...

-flavoured fillings, or chestnut

Chestnut

Chestnut , some species called chinkapin or chinquapin, is a genus of eight or nine species of deciduous trees and shrubs in the beech family Fagaceae, native to temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. The name also refers to the edible nuts they produce.-Species:The chestnut belongs to the...

 purée. The icing is sometimes caramel

Caramel

Caramel is a beige to dark-brown confection made by heating any of a variety of sugars. It is used as a flavoring in puddings and desserts, as a filling in bonbons, and as a topping for ice cream, custard and coffee....

, in which case the dessert may be called a bâton de Jacob.

Other old variants use petit four

Petit four

A petit four is a small confection generally eaten at the end of a meal or served as part of dessert. The name is from the French petit four, meaning "small oven"....

 dough.

Etymology

The word éclair comes directly from a French word whose chief meaning is "lightning" or "flash of lightning." No one is sure why a pastry was named after lightning. Some say the lightness of the cream puff and its soft filling is the reason for the name. Perhaps more likely its richness and oblong shape, easily held in one hand, compel a person to eat it in a flash.

History of the éclair

The éclair probably originated in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 during the nineteenth century. It is a popular type of cake served all over the world. The word is first attested both in English and in French in the 1860s. Some food historians speculate that éclairs were first made by Antonin Carême (1784–1833), the famous French chef. The first known English-language recipe for éclairs appears in the Boston Cooking School Cook Book by Mrs. D.A. Lincoln, published in 1884.

Éclair is French for "lightning," though the connection is obscure.

Outside France

In some parts of the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, Long Johns

Long John (doughnut)

The Long John is a bar-shaped, filled doughnut often embellished with glaze or icing. In some parts of the United States, Long Johns are marketed as éclairs; the two pastries look similar but are created with different types of dough and fillings....

 are marketed under the name éclairs, though the two are not identical. A Long John uses donut

DONUT

DONUT was an experiment at Fermilab dedicated to the search for tau neutrino interactions. Even though the detector operated only during a few months in the summer of 1997, it was largely successful. By detecting the tau neutrino, it confirmed the existence of the last lepton predicted by the...

 pastry and is typically filled with vanilla pudding

Pudding

Pudding most often refers to a dessert, but it can also be a savory dish.In the United States, pudding characteristically denotes a sweet milk-based dessert similar in consistency to egg-based custards, though it may also refer to other types such as bread and rice pudding.In the United Kingdom and...

or custard, making it a simpler and inexpensive alternative to the éclair.

External links

• A brief éclair history