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Paste, Transparent, for Tarts, Etc
Wash three-quarters of a pound of best salt butter in two or three waters, and press it well to free it from moisture. Put it into a saucepan over a gentle fire, until it is melted without being oiled, then set it aside, and when it is nearly cold, stir into it a well-beaten egg and a pound of dried and sifted flour. Roll it out till it is very thin, line the tartlet-tins with it as quickly and lightly as possible, brush them over with water, sift powdered loaf sugar upon them, and bake in a moderate oven for about ten minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 2d.
A melted-butter pastry rather than a rubbed-in one, finished with a sugar glaze that gives the "transparent" surface of the name. The hinge is the butter: melted gently but never allowed to oil, and cooled almost to setting before the egg and flour go in.
- Washing the butterBest salt butter of the period carried a heavy cure and variable brine. Kneading it under two or three changes of cold water drew out salt and buttermilk. With modern unsalted butter the step is unnecessary; simply use 12 oz (340 g) unsalted butter and a good pinch of salt.
- "Melted without being oiled"Oiled means broken — the fat separating out as a clear layer with the milk solids settling. Melt over the lowest heat only until it flows, then take it off. If it separates the paste will be greasy and will not hold a thin sheet.
- Cool it before mixing"Nearly cold" means thickened and cloudy, on the point of setting. Add the egg to hot butter and it scrambles; add the flour to hot butter and the paste turns to a soft, unrollable batter.
- Flour quantityA pound of flour to twelve ounces of butter is a very rich ratio. "Dried and sifted" reflects damp Victorian storage — modern flour needs only sifting. Expect a soft paste; chill it before rolling if it resists.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed. Pounded and sifted, it was roughly comparable to what we would call caster sugar; icing sugar is finer and is likely to disappear into the surface rather than glaze it.
- OvenA moderate oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350\\...
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pound of flour to twelve ounces of butter makes a large batch of thin tartlet linings. The paste is used as a lining only.
- Cost note1s 2d is the original's estimate in pre-decimal sterling, quoted so a housekeeper could price a dish before making it. It has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Cassell's places this among its general pastes because it is a technique rather than a dish: a short paste made by the melted-butter method. The name may well come from the finish -- brushed with water and dusted with sugar, the surface fuses in the oven into a thin glassy sheet -- though the recipe itself does not say so. Recipes of this sort tend to assume salt butter as the default, unsalted butter keeping less well; washing the salt out at the bench appears in domestic cookery books through the nineteenth century. The costing at the end is characteristic of the household dictionaries of the 1870s and after, which sold themselves to mistresses managing servants and needing to check a cook's expenditure at a glance.