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Preserve Puffs
Roll out puff-paste very thin, cut into round pieces, and lay jam on each, fold over the paste, wet edges with white of an egg, and close them; lay them on a baking sheet, ice them, and bake about fifteen minutes. - Mrs. H. A. E.
A turnover in miniature, and the whole thing hinges on keeping the paste cold and the filling scant. Two lines of instruction hide a good deal of assumed knowledge.
- Puff-pasteThe book assumes you already have a laminated butter paste, made from its own puff-paste recipe. All-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed in the refrigerator, does the same job; roll it to about 1/8 inch and cut 3-inch rounds.
- Bake about fifteen minutes — at what heatNo temperature is given; a range of this date had no thermometer to give one. In a modern oven, about 425F for the fifteen minutes stated suits puff paste; the steam has to lift the layers before the butter melts out.
- "Ice them"In this period this means glaze, not frost: brush the tops with beaten egg white and dust with sifted sugar, which sets to a thin crackled shell in the oven. It is not a poured icing added afterward.
- Jam quantityA scant teaspoon per round. Preserves boil and thin as they heat, and an overfilled puff will split at the seam and weld itself to the pan.
- SealingEgg white is the glue here, not water. Brush a narrow band on the exposed edge only — wetting the whole rim leaves egg on the outside, where it fries and browns before the pastry rises.
- Baking sheetLine it with parchment. Any jam that escapes will caramelize hard on bare metal, and these are small enough that one leak ruins its neighbours.
- Yield and servingA pound of pastry cut into 3-inch rounds gives something in the region of twenty puffs, depending on how much is lost to trimmings. Cool at least ten minutes; the filling comes out of the oven far hotter than the crust suggests.
Small filled pastries of this kind are the thrifty end of nineteenth-century pastry work: a batch of puff-paste was a laborious morning's job, and the trimmings and offcuts went into puffs, tarts and patties rather than being wasted. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first published in Ohio in 1877, was compiled from contributions by local women, which is why recipes of this kind end with initials rather than a byline, and why the reader is assumed to know the puff-paste recipe already. The reliance on preserves also reflects the season: a household that had put up jam in summer had a filling on hand in February when fresh fruit did not exist.