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PASTE, SHORT, FOR TARTS AND FRUIT PIES (another way) (To one pound and a quarter)
To one pound and a quarter of fine flour add ten ounces of fresh butter, the yolks of two beaten eggs, and three ounces of sifted loaf sugar; mix up together with half a pint of new milk, and knead it well. This crust is frequently iced.
A sweetened, egg-enriched short paste of the late Victorian kind, closer to a French pâte sucrée than to the plain water crust used for savoury pies. The proportions are given by weight, which makes them easy to follow once the old names are decoded.
- The liquid is the thing to watchHalf a pint in a British book of this period is 10 fl oz, which is a great deal of milk for 1 lb 4 oz of flour once 10 oz of butter and two yolks are already in. Add it a little at a time and stop as soon as the dough coheres; you will very likely need less than the full amount.
- Knead lightly, then rest"Knead it well" meant bring it to a smooth mass, not work it as you would bread dough. Handle it briefly, wrap it, and chill for at least 30 minutes so the butter firms and the gluten relaxes, or the crust will shrink and toughen.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones and grated or crushed for use; "sifted loaf sugar" is simply fine white sugar. Caster sugar is the closest match.
- New milkFresh whole milk, straight from the dairy and unskimmed. Use full-fat milk; skimmed milk will give a drier, paler paste.
- Fresh butterUnsalted butter. Butter kept in salt for storage was often heavily salted, and 'fresh' distinguishes butter that has not been salted for keeping. Have it cool but pliable rather than hard.
- "Frequently iced"This most likely means brushing the crust with beaten egg white and dusting it with fine sugar to set as a thin crackled glaze. Period directions vary as to when it is applied: some brush and sugar before baking, others do so when the pie is nearly baked and return it to the oven briefly to set the glaze.
- OvenNo temperature is given. For a covered fruit pie in this paste, start at about 400F to set the crust and drop to 350F once it has coloured; the sugar and egg in the dough brown faster than a plain crust, so watch it and cover the edges if needed.
- YieldClose to three pounds of dough if all the milk is used, less if you stop short of it; enough for two 9-inch double-crust pies or three or four dozen small tarts. It keeps well wrapped in the refrigerator for two days, or frozen.
"Short" describes what the fat does: it shortens the strands of gluten so the baked crust breaks cleanly instead of stretching. The heading carries more than one version of the same foundation paste, which is what the "another way" in the title signals. The egg yolks and sugar mark this as a sweet paste rather than a plain one, and the direction that the crust "is frequently iced" points to the practice of finishing a fruit pie with a sugared, egg-white glaze. Loaf sugar, sold in hard conical loaves and broken up with sugar nippers at home, is characteristic of nineteenth-century texts; granulated sugar in bags had largely displaced it by the early twentieth century.