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Fruit Turnovers
Stew half a pound of any desired fruit with three ounces of sugar until nearly all the juice is absorbed, and set it aside to cool. Make some puff paste with half a pound of flour, and other ingredients in proportion (see PUFF PASTE, HOUSEHOLD), roll it out thin, and stamp it out into rounds. Lay some of the stewed fruit on the half of each round, turn the other half over, and press the edges together, wetting them with a little water or white of egg to make them stick. Bake in a moderate oven for fifteen to twenty minutes.
A compact Victorian recipe that assumes you know how to make puff paste and can judge an oven by hand. The numbers below fill in what Cassell's left to the cook.
- Oven temperatureA "moderate oven" is usually taken as about 350 degrees375F. (Modern practice for puff paste is to start nearer 400F for the first 10 minutes to set the lift, then drop to 350F to finish, though the recipe itself asks only for a moderate oven throughout.)
- Household puff pasteThe cross-reference is to the economical version, which in manuals of this type generally carries somewhat less fat than the full pound-for-pound puff; the exact proportions are in the separate entry. As a working figure, half a pound of flour with about 6 oz butter (or butter and lard), a good pinch of salt and roughly 4 fl oz iced water. Commercial all-butter puff pastry can be substituted, but one 320 g sheet is less paste than this quantity makes and will give fewer turnovers.
- WeightsHalf a pound of fruit is 8 oz / 225 g prepared weight, three ounces of sugar is a scant half cup. Half a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups.
- The hinge: cook the filling dry"Until nearly all the juice is absorbed" is the whole recipe. Any free syrup will boil, split the seam and run out onto the sheet. Stew the fruit down until a spoon dragged through leaves a clear channel, then cool completely — warm filling melts the butter in the paste before the oven can.
- Fruit choicesApple, plum, damson, apricot and gooseberry all reduce well. Berries and rhubarb throw far more liquid and want a teaspoon of cornstarch stirred in at the end of stewing.
- Sealing and ventingEgg white is the better glue of the two options given; brush a thin band on the bare half-moon of pastry and press with a fork. Cut one short slit in each top so steam escapes upward rather than sideways through the seam.
- Size and yieldRounds stamped at 4 inches give about eight turnovers from this quantity, roughly a tablespoon of fruit in each. Do not overfill — the edge needs a clean half-inch margin.
- ServingDust with caster sugar while still hot and cool on a rack, not on the tray, or the base steams and softens. Best eaten the day they are made.
Enclosing fruit in a folded round of paste is an old and widely spread form of baking: a sealed parcel could be cooked on a griddle, in the embers, or sent to a baker's oven with the family bread, so it did not depend on a domestic oven. The name describes the action: the paste is turned over on itself. The instruction to use "household" puff paste is a note of thrift; nineteenth-century manuals commonly graded puff pastes by their proportion of butter, reserving the richest for company dishes and giving the plainer version to everyday baking like this.