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Brioche, or French Paste
To make this excellent French paste, take two pounds of fine dry flour, and separate eight ounces of it to make the leaven. Place this last into a pan, and mix with it half a pint of yeast and a little warm water. Throw a cloth over the pan, and put it near the fire for about twenty minutes to rise. Meanwhile make a hollow space in the centre of the remaining flour, and put into it half an ounce of salt, half an ounce of finely-sifted sugar, and an eighth of a pint of cream, or some milk if there is no cream. Add a pound of good dry fresh butter cut into small pieces; put them into the flour, and pour over all six eggs well beaten. Work all this with the hand until the whole is quite smooth. If the flour will take one or two eggs more, add them; but the paste must not be so soft as to adhere to the board or roller. When the leaven is well risen, spread the paste out and the leaven over it, and knead well together. Then cut into small portions and mix again, that the leaven may be thoroughly and equally incorporated with the other ingredients. Next, dust some flour on a cloth and roll the brioche (for so it is now called) in it. Put it in a pan, and set it in a cool place in summer, and in a warm place in winter. Use it the early part of the following day; then knead it afresh, and if the French form is desired, make into balls of uniform size. Hollow them at the top by pressing the thumb into them; brush them over with eggs, and put a second much smaller ball into the hollow part of each. Glaze again with yolk of egg, and bake them for half an hour in a quick oven; or the brioche may be formed into cakes and placed on a tin, and supported with pasteboard to prevent the flattening of the cakes. Brioche may also be used as a paste to enclose rissoles, or to make rolls for jams or jellies, or even for vol au vent; but to many persons it is unpalatable on account of the large proportion of butter and eggs. (See also PASTE BRIOCHE.)
A full pound of butter to two pounds of flour puts this squarely in the rich end of brioche territory, and the whole method turns on keeping that butter cool and plastic rather than melted. The instructions are sound; the units and the yeast need translating.
- The hinge: keep everything coolButter worked into flour by hand will soften fast, and once it melts and oils out the dough turns greasy and will not hold gas. Work quickly on a cool surface, and if the dough starts to slacken and shine, chill it for twenty minutes before continuing.
- "Half a pint of yeast"This means liquid barm or brewer's yeast skimmed from fermenting ale, a weak, wet ferment measured by volume. There is no exact modern equivalent; for the eight-ounce sponge, about 2 teaspoons of instant dried yeast (or 15 g fresh) slaked in warm water to a thick batter behaves comparably. Give the sponge longer than twenty minutes if your kitchen is cool.
- Weights in metric2 lb flour is about 900 g, of which 8 oz (225 g) goes to the sponge. 1 lb butter is 450 g, half an ounce of salt about 14 g, the same of sugar. An eighth of an imperial pint of cream is 2½ fl oz, roughly 70 ml.
- "A quick oven"425-450F (220-230C). Half an hour at that heat suits a single large brioche or a loaf; individual brioches à tête of the size described here will be done in 15-20 minutes, and will scorch if left the full thirty.
- The overnight rest"A cool place in summer, a warm place in winter" is the Victorian version of controlled retarding. Use the refrigerator overnight: the dough firms, the butter sets, and the flavour deepens. Chilled brioche dough is also far easier to shape.
- Shaping the têteThe small ball pressed into the thumb hollow is the classic brioche à tête. Set it in properly, in a well-anchored hole, or it slides off in the oven. The "pasteboard supports" are simply a substitute for the fluted brioche mould, which does the job better.
- Egg washTwo glazes are specified, whole egg then yolk. Yolk alone, loosened with a little cream, gives the deep lacquer; keep it off the cut where the tête meets the base or the seam is glued shut and the rise is checked.
- YieldUpwards of 4 lb (about 2 kg) of dough once the liquids are counted; the number of individual brioches will depend on the size they are made.
- As a pastryThe suggested uses as a casing for rissoles or vol-au-vent belong to the older French kitchen, where brioche dough doubled as a rich enclosing paste. It works, but it is a bread, not a puff paste, and it will not shatter or flake.
Cassell's files brioche under paste rather than bread, which tells you how a late-Victorian English kitchen understood it: not as a breakfast roll but as a rich French dough for wrapping and lining, a cousin to puff paste. Brioche itself is generally traced to Normandy, the butter country, and the name is usually connected with the old French verb brier, a regional form of broyer, to pound or knead, though this is more often asserted than settled. The proportion of butter here, half the weight of the flour, is the mark of a brioche riche, and the closing remark that it is "unpalatable to many persons on account of the large proportion of butter and eggs" is a fair snapshot of British taste at the time, admiring French technique while flinching at French richness. The reliance on brewer's barm, measured by the half-pint, dates the entry as much as anything: baker's yeast in reliable compressed cakes was only then becoming general, and until it did, an enriched dough would commonly begin with a sponge set to prove its liveliness first.