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Paste for Meat or Savoury Pies
Sift two pounds of fine flour to one and a half of good salt butter, which has been broken up, and washed well in cold water; rub gently together the butter and flour, mix them up with the yolks of three eggs, beat the whole together with a spoon, and nearly a pint of spring water; roll out the paste, double it in folds three times, and it is ready.
This is a rough puff paste in the older English manner: an enormous batch, very high in butter, built by folding rather than by laminating with a butter block. The proportions are sound but the quantities assume a household baking several pies at once.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of flour is roughly 7 cups and will make paste for several large pies. A quarter batch -- 8 oz flour, 6 oz butter, 1 egg yolk -- is a sensible single-pie quantity; a quarter of the original "nearly a pint" of water would be about 5 fl oz, though you will very likely need less (see below).
- Why the butter is washedSalt butter was the keeping butter of the period, and working it in cold water pulled out excess salt and residual buttermilk, which sours. With modern salted butter, skip the washing and simply omit any added salt; if you use unsalted butter, add about 1 teaspoon of fine salt per pound of flour.
- Keep everything coldWashing in cold water would also have firmed the butter. Whatever you use should be cold, and the text says to rub the butter and flour together gently, so stop while pieces of fat are still visible rather than creaming them in -- those visible pieces are what make the paste flake.
- "Nearly a pint" of waterAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz. That is a generous amount even for 2 lb of flour, and with butter this rich you will very likely need less. Add water gradually and stop when the dough just coheres; a wet rich paste turns greasy and tough.
- Spring waterPeriod recipes commonly specify spring water, presumably to get clean, fresh water; the book gives no reason. Cold tap water is fine, and its temperature matters far more than its source.
- "Double it in folds three times"Most likely three folds with a re-roll between each, in the rough puff manner, though the text does not say which fold is meant. Rest the paste 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator between folds so the butter does not smear and the gluten relaxes.
- The hingeRub the butter in gently and briefly, as the text says. Once the fat is fully absorbed into the flour you have short crust, not a folded paste, and no amount of subsequent folding will bring the layers back.
- BakingNo oven is given because the paste is only half the job. Savoury pies of this type want a hot start — 425F for the first 20 minutes to set and lift the layers — then 350F until the filling is cooked through.
This belongs to a family of English "pie pastes" that sat between short crust and true puff: rich in butter, given a few folds for lift, and strong enough to hold a wet meat filling through a long bake. The instruction to use "good salt butter" and then wash it reflects dairying before refrigeration, when butter was heavily salted to keep; washing butter under cold water before baking appears in English cookery books well before this one and falls away as fresh unsalted butter became reliably available. The egg yolks are there chiefly for colour and richness rather than structure, in contrast to the plainer flour-and-water crusts that were sometimes treated more as containers than as eating.