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Paste, Biscuit
Take one pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of sugar, six yolks of eggs, and a wine-glassful of milk; work all together into a stiff paste. This is good for tarts baked in pans, or for lining moulds.
A sweet egg-yolk pastry of the pâte sucrée family, written for cooks who already knew how paste behaves. The proportions work, but a few of the terms need translating.
- What "paste" and "biscuit" mean here"Paste" is simply pastry dough, and "biscuit" here is likely to mean a crisp sweet biscuit in the British sense, not a soft American quick bread. With no butter, the result is a firm, sandy crust rather than a flaky one.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian and Edwardian cookery books a wine-glass is reckoned at about 2 fl oz, or a scant quarter cup. Add it a spoonful at a time: flour absorbency and yolk size vary, and you want the dough only just cohesive.
- Weights in modern termsOne pound of flour is about 3½ cups; a quarter pound of sugar is a generous half cup. Use caster or ordinary granulated sugar, and weigh the flour if you can, since scooped cups run heavy.
- No butter is not an errorThe richness comes entirely from six yolks, which is why the dough is stiff and slightly brittle. Work it briefly, press it into a disc, and rest it in the refrigerator for at least half an hour so the flour hydrates and the paste rolls without cracking.
- Rolling and liningRoll thin, about 3 mm, on a lightly floured board. For "lining moulds" the paste is pressed into the mould and baked blind with weights so it holds its shape for a filling added later.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake sweet paste shells at 350–375F until pale gold and dry, roughly 15–20 minutes blind, then a few minutes more uncovered. Sugared dough colours fast, so watch the edges.
- YieldEnough for two or three 9-inch tart shells, or a dozen or so small moulds. Surplus can be rolled and cut into plain biscuits, though the recipe itself mentions only tarts and lined moulds.
Nineteenth-century English cookery used "paste" for every kind of pastry dough — short paste, puff paste, raised paste, biscuit paste — and the word shares a root with French pâte, both descending from the Latin pasta. A biscuit paste sits between pastry and confectionery: sweetened, bound with yolks rather than water, and stiff enough to be pressed into moulds and to hold up under fruit, custard or preserve without going soggy. The entry is terse and gives no oven heat at all, on the assumption that a cook already knew her own range and would find the fillings under their own headings.