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Light Plain Paste
Take one pound of flour, six ounces of lard and ten ounces of butter. Rub the lard into the flour, which must be thoroughly dry, work into a smooth paste with only a little water. Roll out thin, press the butter in a cloth to absorb the moisture, put the butter in the center of the paste, fold and press lightly down and roll very thin, dredging the board with a little flour. Fold in three laps and roll and set it in a cool place for a short time. Give it two more workings at intervals; fold again and it should be ready for use. This will make a good light paste for almost any purpose.
This is a rough puff paste built on equal weights of flour and fat, laminated by hand with three or four turns. Written for cooks who knew what puff paste should look like, it leaves out water quantity, salt, resting times and oven heat.
- The weightsOne pound of flour is about 450 g (roughly 3½ cups scooped and levelled, though weighing is far more reliable here). Six ounces lard and ten ounces butter together equal the flour by weight, which puts this at the rich end of pastry.
- Water is unmeasuredThe original says "only a little water." For a pound of flour with the lard already rubbed in, expect somewhere near 6 to 7 fl oz of ice water, added gradually until the dough just coheres. Err dry; a wet paste toughens under the rolling pin.
- No salt is listedButter of the period was commonly salted for keeping, so the paste may have carried some seasoning of its own. With unsalted or lightly salted modern butter, work about a teaspoon of fine salt into the flour.
- Pressing the butter in a clothFarm and dairy butter carried variable water and buttermilk, which made paste heavy and streaky. Commercial butter today is standardised at roughly 80 percent fat, so skip the cloth and instead pound the cold butter flat between sheets of parchment into a slab, keeping it firm but pliable.
- LardRendered leaf lard behaves as the writer intended. The shelf-stable hydrogenated block sold in most supermarkets is a different fat with a waxier mouthfeel; if that is all you have, the paste will still work but will taste blunter.
- "A cool place" and the turnsIn a modern kitchen that means chilling the paste between folds rather than leaving it on the counter; the original says only "a short time." The instructions appear to add up to about four folds in three (a letter fold), which is in line with a light rough puff.
- No oven heat is givenLaminated paste generally wants a hot oven, so its water turns to steam before the butter melts out. Since the paste is offered for "almost any purpose," take the baking temperature from the dish you are making; the recipe supplies none.
- YieldEnough for two double-crust 9-inch pies, or a large batch of tart shells and turnovers. It freezes well wrapped tight, either as a block or already rolled and cut.
"Plain paste" was generally understood as a pastry made without the full labour and butter of proper puff paste, which was typically built on equal weight of butter to flour, with many more turns and worked cold. Here part of the butter is replaced by cheaper lard and rubbed in at the start, so the cook gets a serviceable flaky lift from three or four turns rather than a dozen. The instruction to press the butter in a cloth points to a time before creameries standardised butterfat, when a pound of butter might carry a good deal of water and residual buttermilk, and that moisture could be the difference between leaves of pastry and a slab of shortcrust. Household books often offered several grades of paste and expected the reader to choose by occasion and by what was in the larder.