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Jam Puffs, or Turnovers
Make some good puff paste or short crust (see JAM PATTIES); roll it out to the eighth of an inch in thickness, then stamp it out in rounds with a saucer or plate, or into squares. Spread a little jam on half the pastry, wet the edges, and turn the other half quite over. Press the edges neatly together, and bake in a quick oven. Time, about twenty minutes to bake. Probable cost, 1 1/2d. each.
A bare-bones formula that assumes you already have pastry made and a hot oven waiting. The only real difficulty is jam escaping, and most of the advice below addresses that.
- "A quick oven"In modern terms somewhere around 425F, though period oven descriptions are approximate. Puff paste in particular needs that heat to lift; in too cool an oven the butter can melt out before the layers set, giving a greasy, flat turnover.
- Rolling and stampingAn eighth of an inch is thin. A saucer gives a small turnover; a tea plate gives a more familiar size. Cut squares if you want no trimmings to re-roll.
- Use thick jam, and not muchA rounded teaspoon per small round is enough. Loose or runny jam boils, forces the seal and welds the pastry to the tray. Leave a clear half-inch border of dry pastry all the way round.
- SealingWet the edges with water rather than egg, press with the back of a fork or fingertip, then chill the assembled puffs for 20 minutes before baking. Cold pastry holds its seam. A small slit in the top lets steam out where you want it.
- Lining the trayThe book says nothing about the tray. Parchment saves the ones that do leak and makes them liftable.
- FinishingBrushing with water or egg white and dusting with caster sugar before baking gives a crackled sugar top. It is not in the original.
- Timing and yieldTwenty minutes is about right at that heat for pastry this thin; check at fifteen. Roughly a pound of pastry makes eight to ten small turnovers.
- CoolingThe jam comes out of the oven far hotter than the pastry suggests. Let them stand at least ten minutes.
Turnovers are among the most practical uses of pastry: a piece of paste, a spoonful of preserve, folded and sealed so it can be eaten out of hand with no plate and no spoon. Cassell's cross-references jam patties, which share one batch of paste, which is why the recipe cross-references rather than repeating itself. The costing of a penny-halfpenny each is the telling detail: this is a book written for households keeping accounts, where the price per item mattered as much as the method, and where jam itself is generally said to have become cheap enough to treat casually only recently, thanks to industrial sugar and commercial preserving. "Puff" and "turnover" were used interchangeably in Victorian kitchens, the second name simply describing the action of folding the pastry over the filling.