Eclairs sweet for dessert today

An éclair is French, and it is a small feat of physics. The pastry is choux — flour, butter, water and egg cooked into a paste before baking — and it works because the water in it turns to steam in the oven and blows the middle hollow. That empty space is the entire point: it is there to be filled.

Cream goes in the hollow, chocolate goes on top. Every part is doing one job and doing it obviously, which is probably why the thing has survived unchanged for a century and a half.

It is a long way from street food, and that contrast is part of what makes it interesting on a plate in Lagos — a pastry built for a Paris counter, eaten here.