Vive L'Éclair!

As an incitement to memory, the madeleine is the most celebrated among pastries. In my own life, the éclair holds pride of place. The bulk of my childhood is a blur, and what isn’t a blur is a blank. But in the midst of all that fuzziness and darkness, I can still see myself, twelve years old, suffering through the sixth grade and hating every minute of it, the morning my home economics teacher Mrs. O’Toole – a tall, hunchbacked Irish woman with a quavering voice– taught us how to make cream puff pastry.

 

We were in a model kitchen classroom on the top floor of the school, a terrible location it turned out, unless you were a hyperactive preteen with a penchant for throwing food, utensils, and even furniture out the window. I was not so out of the ordinary that I didn’t also sometimes indulge in the pleasures of defenenstration, though usually my contributions were minor, unlike Eddie Farrell, for example, who once managed to get a whole desk out the window before Mrs. O’Toole could stop him. But then she never managed to stop anyone, and her fluty panic only encouraged bolder experimentation. The point wasn’t to get the window open and shut before she noticed, but to dare how much one could get over the sill in plain sight. And the reward wasn’t the exasperated look on Mrs. O’Toole’s face, though we definitely sensed her weakness, evident in the way her voice broke every time she mentioned her deceased husband, her wastrel son (it was the late 1970s and I feel certain in retrospect that he must have had a drug problem), her beloved Ireland. Instead the aim was to experience the sound of cartons of milk and bags of flour exploding, glass measuring cups shattering, wooden spoons and steel bowls thudding as they hit concrete. Later in the day we might venture out to inspect the debris, but it was considered vulgar ever to look down. We were above the prejudice of sight.

It seems a miracle in the midst of so much chaos that a woman with such shattered nerves somehow managed to teach us to back stitch with a needle and thread and run a sewing machine, to make a hook rug and to crochet, to make pretzels and chocolate chip cookies, to load a dishwasher and when we were finished for the morning always to wipe the stainless steel sink clean with a paper towel so that it gleamed.

I didn’t think at the time I had been paying much attention, but something in her lessons must have taken, because to this day my kitchen is always cleaner after I have cooked than when I started, and I can’t abide messy and inefficient cooks, those who use more pots and dishes than necessary for the task at hand, who leave in their wake a sink overflowing with crusted cookware and selfishly, stupidly seem to expect that the cooking and the cleaning have nothing to do with each other, that their responsibility for the former entails no responsibility for the latter, when just the opposite is the case, is the hallmark  of a mindful cook and not some passive aggressive seeker of compliments. 

What is the pleasure in nourishing others with one’s cooking if it is always taxed in labor? If the price others must pay is the mess one leaves behind? If it takes more time to clean up after the meal than to consume it? It is a sure sign of how degraded contemporary hospitality has become that guests feel the compulsion, the expectation, at the end of a meal to offer to help with the dishes, and even worse that any host would accept such an offer

Back to the éclair:  Standing before the electric stovetop that morning stirring my cup of flour into the pot of boiling water and butter until it clumped around the spoon, beating the eggs one at a time into the slippery resistant mess until it became a smooth glossy yellow batter and my palms were sore, I sensed I was on the verge of a momentous discovery. Change was in the air, its scent mingling with the chemical fragrance wafting from the tubes of strawberry lip gloss that the Taylor twins – Mary and Mary Ann—waved before their own and everyone else’s faces. The dough didn’t interest them at all, until I began dropping it onto a cookie sheet in sticky mounds and Mary Ann – she was the older twin, the adventurous one – reached for a clump and smooshed it between her fingers and then streaked it into the hair of a girl at the station beside us, Kimberly Jackson the habitual object of Mary Ann’s meanness.

Above the din of Mary Ann scuffling on the floor with Kimberly I heeded carefully Mrs. O’Toole’s instructions, smoothing the tops of my pastry balls with a wet finger, slipping them into the preheated oven, guarding the door against the depredations of Mary Ann, Mary all the while watching blank-eyed, her canister of lip gloss gripped tight in one hand, the top of the tube moving regularly from the surface of her lower lip to the tip of her nose and back again.

When I opened the oven door twenty five minutes later and beheld the sheet of turgid pasty shells, my heart skipped a beat. The change was magical. From little pale flabby raw yellow blobs my dough had grown into robust golden crispy inflated proud globes, the tops crackled and broadly creased, the bases hard and brown, the sides just a touch spongy but holding strongly their shape, showing the latent vigor of my hard beating and the heat of the oven. Then we filled them with sweetened whipped cream and I gleaned my first definite taste of a new world of pleasure that would remain always within my grasp, the custardy crackle of pastry between my teeth and unctuous explosion of dairy across my lips and tongue that followed. Meanwhile at his station on the other side of the room Eddie Farrell was chomping a cream puff, pushing out his cheeks like he was impersonating the north wind before clamping down on them hard with his palms, spraying the stove, the sink, the dishwasher, and the wall behind them, announcing to our sixth grade world his place in its hierarchy in relation to lovers of pastry like myself

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At home soon after I was repeating the adventure. I’ve never renounced whipped cream entirely, but I quickly decided I needed a more substantial filling. From a copy of the New York Times Cookbook I learned to make pastry cream. The éclair then became my obsession. I was a monomaniac, and no event was too minor to serve as excuse for me to commandeer the kitchen, nor did anyone attempt to restrain me, perhaps because no laws were broken by anyone in the inter-generational indulgence of my pastry desires. Everyone was free to partake.

I consider therefore the éclair as an emblem and prototype of single and singular delights. The sole point of the éclair, I argue, is to eat the entire thing. Sharing an éclair is like sharing a piece of gum or a pair of underwear. It’s disgusting and stupid. Vive l'éclair!