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Paste, Rich Cream, for Tarts
Dry and sift a pound of flour, and mix with it half a tea-spoonful of salt and a table-spoonful of crushed loaf sugar. Rub into it a quarter of a pound of sweet butter, and mix gradually with it sufficient cream to make it into a smooth paste. If cream cannot be had, the yolks of two eggs may be beaten up with a little milk, and substituted for it. Roll the paste out two or three times, and use as quickly as possible. Probable cost, if made with cream, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A lean, sweetened short paste for open tarts — closer to a sweet pie crust than to puff pastry. The original gives weights for everything except the liquid, which is where all the judgement lies.
- The hinge: add the cream a spoonful at a timeThe original gives no quantity, and the amount needed varies with the flour; expect somewhere between half a cup and a cup for a pound of flour. Stop as soon as the dough coheres when pressed; an extra tablespoon turns this from tender to tough.
- Weights in cupsA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled, or 450 g. A quarter pound of butter is one American stick (115 g). Weighing is worth the trouble here because the fat-to-flour ratio is deliberately low.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and broken or crushed as needed. Crushed loaf sugar is simply granulated sugar; a tablespoon of ordinary white sugar is the direct equivalent.
- Sweet butterChiefly means unsalted, though in period usage the term also carried the sense of fresh, unrancid butter rather than salted keeping butter. The half teaspoon of salt in the flour is doing the seasoning.
- The egg substitutionTwo yolks beaten with milk to make the same volume as the cream you would have used works well and gives a slightly firmer, more golden crust. Since the paste is baked, raw yolk is not a concern.
- Rolling two or three timesThe original says only to roll the paste out two or three times; it does not describe a fold, though a light lamination (roll out, fold, roll again) is the usual reading. Either way it is not the six or more turns of puff pastry. With only 4 oz of butter to a pound of flour it will never puff.
- "Use as quickly as possible"The instruction is about keeping the butter cold and unsmeared in a period kitchen without refrigeration. Modern practice differs: chill the folded dough 20 to 30 minutes before the final roll so the gluten relaxes and the shell does not shrink in the tin.
- Oven and yieldNo temperature is given, as was usual for cookery books of the period. For a blind-baked shell, 400F is right, with the case lined and weighted for 15 minutes. This quantity should line two 9-inch tart tins with enough trimming for a lattice.
Cassell's separates its pastes by richness and by intended use, and this one sits between plain short crust and the expensive puff pastes: enriched with cream and a little sugar, but with only a quarter pound of butter to the pound of flour, it was pastry for fruit tarts rather than for grand set pieces. The costing -- 1s 6d a pound if made with cream -- is as much a part of the entry as the method: Cassell's gives a probable cost for its recipes so a housekeeper could judge what she was committing to, and the book offers egg yolks and milk as the alternative where cream cannot be had. The reference to crushed loaf sugar dates the text as much as the price does: granulated sugar was displacing the old cone-shaped loaf through the later nineteenth century, but recipes went on assuming the reader would be breaking sugar up herself.