Choux pastry itself is a French invention — a cooked dough made by heating water, butter, and flour together before beating in eggs, which gives it a high moisture content that creates steam in the oven and causes the pastry to puff and hollow out. The technique was developed in the 16th century, attributed variously to a chef named Pantanelli who came to France with Catherine de’ Medici, and later refined by Marie-Antoine Carême, who seems to appear in the origin story of nearly every significant French pastry. The éclair as a distinct form — elongated, filled, glazed — appears in the 19th century, by which point French pâtisserie had codified most of its classic shapes and formats.

The name means “lightning” in French, and the most entertaining explanation is that the pastry was so good it was eaten in a flash. More likely it refers to the way the chocolate glaze catches the light. Either way, the name stuck, and the éclair became a permanent fixture of every serious French pastry case from Paris to the provinces.

In recent years the éclair has undergone the full modernist treatment — elongated showcases filled with exotic creams, topped with mirror glazes, decorated with edible gold and geometric precision. Parisian pastry chef Christophe Adam built an entire shop, L’Éclair de Génie, around reimagined versions of the form. Some of them are genuinely brilliant. But the original chocolate éclair, made well, needs nothing added to it.

• Italian Influence

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Regional Roots

• France