A Recipe That Mom Made

Chocolate Eclairs

*As Requested

I was the oldest of 5 daughters with one older brother and one younger one. Yes, there are seven kids. We were raised in a traditional household during the 60’s and 70’s and mom did all the cooking. She was a good cook, and I have often marveled at how she was able to feed 7 children on a carpenter’s wages. There were plenty of food rules of course. No seconds on the meat entree, unless you ate your vegetables and maybe had seconds of those too. No leaving the table until you cleared your plate. Thankfully, we always had a Labrador Retriever who was often very helpful with that rule.

Mom made many delicious meals, and she had a favorite recipe book: Betty Crocker. I don’t know how much my mom learned from her mom about cooking.  I do know that any cooking knowledge that I started with, I learned from my mom.

Pot roast, fried chicken, spaghetti with homemade meat sauce, LASAGNA, chop suey, meatloaf, tuna noodle casserole, broiled steaks, broiled halibut (then billed as poor man’s lobster) pineapple upside down cake. Later dishes included shrimp creole, Crab Louie salad, homemade fried fish and homemade French fries. These are just a few recipes I learned from Mom. These are the recipes I loved to eat. She also made liver and onions. I hated it then, I hate it now. That was always a hard sell at the dinner table.

There is not a jump to recipe link,  but now for the recipe for Mom’s Chocolate Eclairs. Of course, there was never enough. We could all gobble those sweet treats down so quickly.  You can bet your sweet bippy that Mom doubled this recipe to feed her family!

This is the recipe is from Betty.

Here ya’ go little sis, as requested.

Betty Crocker’s Cream Puff Recipe

*Change the shape for eclairs

INGREDIENTS

CREAM FILLING
⅓ cup sugar
2 tbsp. cornstarch
⅛ tsp. salt
2 cups milk
2 egg yolks, slightly beaten
2 tbsp. butter, softened
2 tsp. vanilla

PUFFS
1 cup water
½ cup butter
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 eggs

CHOCOLATE FROSTING
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1 tsp. butter
1 cup powdered sugar

PUFFS
Heat water and margarine <USE BUTTER> to a rolling boil in 2 ½-quart saucepan. Stir in flour; reduce heat. Stir vigorously over low heat about 1 minute or until mixture forms a ball; remove from heat. Beat in eggs, all at once; continue beating until smooth.

Shape each into finger about 4 ½ inches long and 1½ inches wide with spatula. Bake as directed; cool.

Bake 35 to 40 minutes at 400° or until puffed and golden brown. Cool away from draft. Cut off top one third of each half and pull out any filaments of soft dough. Fill puffs with cream filling. Replace tops frost with chocolate frosting. Refrigerate until serving time.

FILLING
Mix sugar, cornstarch, and salt in 2-quart saucepan. Gradually stir in milk. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils. Boil and stir 1 minute. Gradually stir at least half of the hot mixture into egg yolks. Stir into hot mixture in saucepan. Boil and stir 1 minute; remove from heat. Stir in margarine and vanilla; cool.

CHOCOLATE FROSTING
Heat chocolate and butter in 1-quart saucepan over low heat until melted; remove from heat. Stir in powdered sugar and hot water. Beat until smooth and of spreading consistency.

Please note, when they “invented” boxed pudding, Mom would make the vanilla pudding and use that as a filling for the eclairs. It was even suggested by Betty herself to use the substitute. Of course, as years went by, there was peppermint filing, eggnog flavor filling, ice cream filling and chocolate filling and more. Nothing ever tasted as good as Mom and Betty’s original homemade filling.

https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/cream-puffs/f83fb235-2014-42c3-9676-c4848ed07f48

Bippy:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bippy

“Note: The line “You bet your (sweet) bippy!” was popularized in the American television show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, which ran from January 1968 to March 1973. George Schlatter, the executive producer of the show, said the following about the word: “Our shows are gone through quite thoroughly for taste. What upsets most of the critics are the jokes they don’t understand, and that’s more of an educational problem than a taste problem. We say things like ‘You bet your bippy!’ or ‘You bet your nurdle!’ I’m sure some people attach a dirty connotation to those words. We don’t even know what they mean; they’re just funny” (quoted in Joan Barthel, “Hilarious, Brash, Flat, Peppery, Repetitious, Topical and in Borderline Taste,” New York Times Magazine, 6 Oct. 1968). The hypothesis that the word was borrowed from Yiddish pipik/pupik “navel” has not been confirmed.”

I love you and miss you.

You know who you are.