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Jam Patties
Rub two ounces of fresh butter into a quarter of a pound of dried and sifted flour. Add a pinch of salt and a salt-spoonful of sugar, and moisten with the yolk of an egg, beaten up with two table-spoonfuls of cold water. Roll the paste out twice, and each time spread an ounce of butter on it. Dredge a little flour over it, fold it up in a roll, and let it stand in a cool place for an hour or two. Before making it up roll it out once or twice, and the last time leave it the thickness of half an inch, then stamp it out in fourteen small rounds, and with a smaller cutter stamp again quite through six of them, leaving a ring three-quarters of an inch wide. Lay a pastry ring on each perfect round, first moistening it a little with water to make it adhere securely. Bake the patties in a quick oven, fill them while warm with jam, and put on the top a small ornament, which has been lightly baked with the patties. Time, ten minutes to bake the patties. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each. Sufficient for six patties.
This is a rough puff pastry built in the pan rather than by the classic French method, stamped into little ring-walled cases and filled with jam after baking. The proportions are 4 oz flour to 4 oz butter in total, which is a full puff ratio.
- Weights in metricA quarter pound of flour is 115 g; the initial 2 oz butter is 55 g, with two further 1 oz (30 g) additions rolled in. Two tablespoons of water with one yolk is a firm, barely moist dough, which is correct here.
- Salt-spoonfulA Victorian salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. Use that for the sugar; the pastry is meant to be nearly unsweetened since the jam supplies the sugar.
- A quick oven425-450F (220-230C). Puff needs the initial blast to convert the butter's water to steam and lift the layers; a moderate oven leaks butter and gives flat, greasy rounds. Ten minutes is right at that heat, and the rings colour before the bases dry out.
- Keep everything coldThis is the hinge. The butter spread between rolls must stay in sheets, not smear into the flour, so the hour or two of resting in a cool place is not optional. If the dough softens while you are stamping, chill it again before it goes in the oven.
- The count of roundsFourteen rounds gives six solid bases and six rings, with two rounds left over; the recipe does not say what the 'ornament' is made from, though the small centres stamped out of the rings would serve. Yield is six patties as stated.
- Stamping cleanlyPress the cutter straight down without twisting. Twisting seals and drags the laminated edge, and the rings will rise lopsided or not at all.
- FillingFill while warm but not oven-hot, as the recipe directs; jam left standing in the cases will soften the pastry, so fill close to serving.
- Probable cost1 1/2d. each is old pence; like other entries of its kind, the recipe gives a probable cost per patty and a yield.
Small jam-filled puff cases like these resemble a scaled-down, domestic version of the French vol-au-vent and bouch\preary preserve instead of a savoury ragout, though no direct line of descent is documented. Cassell's cookery dictionary was arranged as an alphabetical reference for middle-class households, which fits an entry that gives a probable cost per patty and a yield. That jam is treated as an obvious, cheap filling is consistent with the later nineteenth century, when sugar prices fell and commercial preserve makers made jam a year-round larder item rather than only a post-summer one. The technique is what would now be called rough or flaky puff: butter rubbed in first, then more butter spread between rolls, and period books do contrast such shortcuts with a full puff paste of many turns.