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Brioche Paste
Seven fresh eggs are required for ten pounds of dried and warmed flour and one pound of sweet butter; also a little compressed yeast. Put the yeast into a portion of the flour, add warm water and mix to form the leaven. Set it to rise after making a slit in the top. The leaven being ready, take the remaining flour, make a hole in the middle, put in a saltspoonful of salt and the same quantity of powdered sugar, with a little water to melt it. Slightly whisk the eggs, break the butter small, and work the whole well together by kneading and spreading alternately. Spread again, lay the leaven evenly over all, and knead and work until the whole is evenly and thoroughly mixed. When finished, flour a towel, wrap the paste in it, and put in a cold place in hot weather, or a warm place in cold weather, to have it ready for the next day.
This makes the most delicate dumplings for soups or stews, cut in shapes and fried; it is nice with braised dishes. It makes the best case for lobster or other patties, and is an excellent side-dish, cut and fried in shapes. It may be boiled in cup shapes and served with asparagus, cut small and heaped on top with white sauce around it. In fact, there is an endless variety of uses to which the cook may put this paste; the only drawback is, it is troublesome to make.
This is a professional bakery formula dropped into a household book, and the quantities have to be read with that in mind. Scaled down and given the right rise, it produces a lean enriched dough closer to an egg bread than to the butter-heavy brioche of a modern pastry kitchen.
- Read the proportions before you startSeven eggs and one pound of butter to ten pounds of flour is about 10% butter and less than one egg per pound of flour. Modern brioche runs 40-70% butter. If you want what a pastry cook today would call brioche, this is not the ratio; if you want a workable frying and patty-case dough, it is.
- Scaling it downFor a domestic batch, divide by ten: 1 lb (about 3 1/2 cups) flour, 1 1/2 oz butter, 1 lightly beaten egg (use a small egg, or two-thirds of a large one by weight), plus water. How many shapes or cases that yields depends entirely on how large you cut them.
- Compressed yeastThe fresh cake yeast the book assumes is still sold in some markets; one 0.6 oz cake equals about 2 1/4 tsp active dry or instant yeast. For the scaled-down quantity above, a third of a cake or 3/4 tsp dry yeast is ample given the long rest.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. That is the salt for the whole ten pounds of flour, which is far too little by modern taste; about 1 1/2 tsp fine salt per pound of flour is nearer the usual bread proportion, and the recipe asks for the same quantity of sugar as salt.
- "Dried and warmed flour"Flour was stored in sacks in damp pantries and was routinely warmed and sifted before use to drive off moisture and take the chill off the dough. Bagged flour kept indoors needs no drying, though bringing it to room temperature still helps the yeast.
- The leaven and the slitThe levain is a soft sponge of flour, yeast and warm water set to ferment on its own; the slit cut in the top is traditionally said to let the baker judge the rise by how far it opens. Reckon on something like 45 minutes to an hour at room temperature, until domed and visibly aerated.
- The overnight rest is the hinge"A cold place in hot weather, or a warm place in cold weather" is an instruction to even out the temperature so the dough ferments slowly overnight without going sour or slack. A refrigerator overnight will do the job and makes the paste far easier to cut and shape than it is fresh.
- Frying and boiling the shapesFor the fried dumplings, cut the chilled paste into small pieces, let them rise briefly, and fry at 350-360F until deep gold; two to three minutes should see them through. The "cup shapes" for asparagus were most likely cooked in small buttered moulds rather than dropped loose into water, though the recipe does not say so.
Pâte à brioche occupied a different place in the professional kitchen of the period than it does now. Alongside the sweet breakfast loaf, cooks kept a leaner version as a utility dough: a case for patties in place of puff paste, and a base for the small fried garnishes that dressed braised meats. That is the dough described here, which explains proportions that look impoverished beside a modern brioche. The name itself is generally traced to the Norman verb brier, a dialect form of broyer, meaning to work or pound dough, and the pastry has long been associated with Normandy and its butter. American household books of this period leaned heavily on French professional practice for their "useful recipes" sections, and the text closes with the admission that the paste is "troublesome to make."