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German Puff Paste
Take one pound of butter and one of flour. Mix the butter into one-half of the flour, using a knife; mix the remainder of the flour with the yolk of one egg and half a cup of milk; no salt; roll it out and divide it into four parts. Then divide the other portion in four parts; roll out one of the quarters without shortening; place one of the quarters, which has the butter in, on it, and fold over; then roll out; repeat this three times; do the same with the other quarters. This is enough for eight pies, for covers; the under crust can be made of the following: Three cups flour, one cup lard, one-half cup butter, one-half cup water; stir lightly with a knife.
II. Pies for Dyspeptics.
SOME persons will eat pies, when they know they disagree with them. If so, let them stick to the pies mentioned in this section, and if they must eat the crust, let it be made by taking equal quantities of Graham and white flour, wet with thin sweet cream, bake in a hot oven, as common pie-crust. Or take a piece of bread dough, after it has risen, and roll in a small piece of butter; roll out as pie-crust.
This is a rough puff paste built in quarters rather than as one large block, which keeps each portion small enough to handle in a warm kitchen. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what laminated dough should feel like, so a few things need spelling out.
- The hinge: keep it coldA pound of butter worked into flour will smear the moment it warms, and smeared butter gives a mealy crust instead of layers. Chill the butter-flour quarters and the plain-flour quarters for 20-30 minutes before rolling, and again between each of the three folds if the dough starts to feel greasy or springy.
- Weights into cupsOne pound of butter is 4 sticks or 2 cups; one pound of flour is roughly 3 1/2 cups, spooned and levelled. The recipe splits the flour by halves, so about 1 3/4 cups goes into the butter and 1 3/4 cups into the egg-and-milk dough.
- "No salt"The instruction most likely assumes salted butter, which was common in the period, though practice varied and much butter was churned at home. With unsalted butter, add about 1 teaspoon of salt to the flour that gets the egg and milk, or the paste may taste flat.
- "Without shortening"Shortening here means fat of any kind, not the canned vegetable product. The quarter rolled "without shortening" is simply the plain egg-and-milk dough, which acts as the wrapper for the butter-rich quarter.
- Three turns, not moreRolling and folding three times is enough for the flaky, uneven lift this style of paste is after. Pushing it to six or seven turns, as for a classic French puff, will overwork a dough that has no salt and no resting schedule to support it.
- Graham flourIn the dyspeptics' crust, Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground with the bran and germ left in. Ordinary whole-wheat flour is the closest supermarket equivalent; "thin sweet cream" means fresh unsweetened cream, roughly today's light or single cream.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says 'hot oven' only in the dyspeptics' crust instruction; for pastry of this kind that is usually taken as roughly 425-450F. Puff paste needs that initial blast to turn the water in the butter to steam and force the layers apart; a moderate oven melts the butter out before it can lift.
- Yield and storageThe paste makes eight top crusts, which is more than most kitchens need at once. Wrap the unused quarters tightly and refrigerate up to three days or freeze up to three months; roll them from cold, not from room temperature.
- The under crustThree cups flour to a cup of lard and half a cup of butter is a very rich short crust. Leaf lard or a good rendered lard behaves best; modern block lard handles differently and is worth chilling well before rolling.
Puff paste was the show-off pastry of nineteenth-century American cookery, and this version is a shortened one: butter worked into part of the flour first, then wrapped and folded only three times, rather than the many-turn French method that demanded a cool marble slab and a patient cook. Books of this period often carried more than one grade of pie crust, as this page does, with a plain paste for everyday and a laminated one saved for company. The note on "pies for dyspeptics" belongs to a wider Victorian preoccupation with indigestion, and to the influence of Sylvester Graham, whose advocacy of coarse unsifted wheat flour in the 1830s put his name on the flour and on a whole moralising tradition about rich pastry being bad for the stomach. That a cookbook felt obliged to legislate for people who would eat pie regardless of the consequences says a good deal about how central pie was to the American table.