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Paste for Meat or Fruit Pies, Etc
Mix the eighth part of a peck of flour with sufficient cream and raw eggs to form into a paste. Add half a pound of butter broken in pieces, which must not be too small, and roll the paste lightly. To make paste for custards, mix the flour with boiling water and butter, sugar being added, if necessary. If this is done, it will be found to increase the stiffness of the paste. (See also CRUST, DRIPPING.)
Two pastries in one entry: a rich rough-puff bound with cream and egg for meat and fruit pies, and a hot-water-and-butter paste for custards. The measurements are volumetric and vague even by Victorian standards, so treat the flour figure as a starting point and judge the dough by feel.
- An eighth of a peckA peck is two dry gallons, so an eighth is one dry quart — roughly 4½ cups of flour, somewhere around 1 to 1¼ lb (500–570 g). Flour was also reckoned by the peck as a weight of about 14 lb in some trades, which would make the eighth nearer 1¾ lb; the original is genuinely ambiguous. Start with a pound and add more only if the dough is slack.
- Butter proportionHalf a pound of butter to a pound of flour is a 1:2 ratio, standard for a rich short or rough-puff paste. Use unsalted butter, cold and firm, and add a good pinch of salt to the flour since Victorian butter was salted.
- "Broken in pieces, which must not be too small"This is the hinge of the first paste. Walnut-sized lumps of cold butter left visible in the dough are what produce flakes when the water in them turns to steam. Rubbing the butter in fully gives a short, crumbly crust instead.
- Cream and raw eggsNo quantity is given because the flour's thirst varies. Beat one or two eggs into a few tablespoons of cream and add gradually, stopping the moment the dough coheres — around 150 ml of total liquid per pound of flour. Overwetting is the usual failure.
- "Roll the paste lightly"Roll and fold two or three times, turning the dough a quarter-turn between folds, then rest it covered in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before the final roll. Victorian kitchens were cold; a modern one is not, and warm butter will smear rather than layer.
- The custard pasteFlour mixed with boiling water and butter is a hot-water crust, the same technique as raised pork pies. It is worked warm and pliable, moulds well, and sets firm rather than flaky — which is why it holds a wet custard filling without collapsing. Roughly 1 lb flour to 4 oz butter melted in 200 ml boiling water.
- Sugar in the hot-water pasteThe claim that sugar stiffens the paste reflects period practice rather than a precise chemical account; sugar does help a baked crust set crisp and firm, though in quantity it tenderises the dough. Two tablespoons is plenty for a sweet crust.
- BakingNo temperature is given. Rich egg-and-cream paste wants a hot oven, 425°F (220°C), to set the layers before the butter runs out; a filled custard tart is better blind-baked hot then finished at 325–350°F (160–180°C) so the filling does not curdle.
- YieldA pound of flour makes enough for a double-crust pie of 9–10 inches, or two single crusts.
The cross-references to CRUST and DRIPPING point to related pastry entries elsewhere in the book. The two methods here mark a real division in the Victorian kitchen: the butter-and-cream paste is company food, expensive in fat and eggs, while hot-water crust is the older and more utilitarian technique, generally traced to the medieval "coffyn" — a thick flour-and-water case built to contain a filling through a long bake, originally as much a vessel as a food. Measuring flour by the peck belongs to an era when households bought grain in bulk measures and scaled everything else by eye against it.