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Puff-Paste, French
Take the same quantity of butter as of flour, so that if you use two pounds of the one you must also use two pounds of the other; and so on. Weigh two pounds of very dry flour, and sift it; then lay it on the table, and make a very large hole in the middle; throw in a little pinch of salt, a few small pieces of butter, and three yolks of eggs; use a little cold water to melt the salt; take water enough to make the paste of the same consistency as the butter. In winter you must make the paste very firm, because then the butter is so; in summer you must make the paste very soft, on account of the butter being the same. The reason you are obliged to do so is, that if the paste were not made of the same substance as the butter, the latter, when you turn the paste, would break through. When you have worked the flour lightly, mould it into a large ball, which flatten as quickly as possible; turn it in a spiral direction, and flatten the middle. Lay butter on the table, with a little water, handle it to extract the white liquid, and squeeze it in a clean towel, that no moisture may remain. Lay the ball of butter over the paste, flatten the butter with a cloth, then fold the paste over the butter all round, but in a square form, so as to wrap it well all over. Try whether the paste is firm enough to prevent the butter from breaking through it. Now powder a little flour over the table and the paste. Roll the paste as smooth as possible with the rolling-pin as long as you can; fold it in three, and roll it over once again, taking care always to powder it over with a very little flour, to prevent it sticking to the table or to the rolling-pin. After having spread it well, fold it again in three. Make two marks on the top with the rolling-pin, to remember that it has been rolled twice. Then put it into a plate trimmed with a little flour: place it on the ground to keep it cool, and leave it there for a little while. Shortly after put the paste on the table, and proceed twice more as before; then let it rest again, and give it two turnings more, which makes six in all. Now give it a long shape, and fold it in two. You may then use it to make a vol-au-vent: when, at the latter end, fold the paste double only, and that is what is called half a turning. Of course you are aware that the paste must have had six turnings and a half before you can make a vol-au-vent, and that you must keep the paste thicker than for other small articles of pastry. Cut the vol-au-vent the size of the dish in which it is to be sent up, and immediately after put it into a plafond; brush it over with yolks of egg, open it all round with the point of the knife, and put it in a very hot oven. Mind that puffpaste always requires the oven to be very hot. If you are not careful to keep the oven shut the vol-au-vent will not rise properly. When it is well baked a fine colour, and you are certain that it is done through, take it out of the oven, remove the middle which served as a cover, empty and throw away the paste of the middle which is not baked, and lay the vol-au-vent cleanly on some paper to extract the butter. When you are ready to serve up, dish the vol-au-vent, and fill it with whatever you think proper. With regard to small articles of pastry, spread more puff-paste, and cut it with cutters of different shapes; if intended for entrees, brush the paste over with yolks of eggs, but de not glaze it with sugar. By glazing is here meant the sifting of finely-powdered sugar over the pastry when baked and emptied, and using over it a red-hot salamander, or else putting it into a very hot oven for the sugar to melt and glaze.
This is classic pâte feuilletée written for a professional pastry room, with quantities and vocabulary to match. The instructions are sound; what needs translating are the scale, the vessels and the oven.
- Scale it downTwo pounds of flour to two pounds of butter yields well over four pounds of dough. A quarter of that quantity (8 oz flour, 8 oz butter, 1 yolk, a pinch of salt, water as needed) is plenty for one vol-au-vent or two dozen small shapes.
- The hinge: match the two consistenciesEverything else follows from the instruction to make the détrempe the same firmness as the butter. If the butter is harder than the dough it shatters into flakes; if softer it bleeds out at the fold. Press both between finger and thumb before you laminate and let one rest until they feel alike.
- Washing the butterWorking butter under cold water and wringing it in a towel drives out buttermilk and water from a churned, salted, variable farm butter. Modern unsalted butter, 80% fat or more and consistent from pack to pack, needs none of this; simply beat it flat between sheets of parchment until pliable but still cool.
- "Place it on the ground to keep it cool"The coldest spot in a Victorian kitchen was the stone floor or the larder slab. Refrigerate instead, 20-30 minutes between each pair of turns, and longer if the kitchen is warm.
- Counting the turnsA "turn" here is a fold in three (a letter fold). Six of them, plus a final fold in two for the half turn, is in line with classical French practice for puff paste, and it produces the tall, even lift a vol-au-vent needs. Marking the count with two dimples of the rolling-pin is a traditional trick still used by some pastry cooks.
- Plafond and salamanderA plafond is a flat, heavy iron baking sheet; use a thick, unlined baking tray. A salamander was an iron plate heated red and held over the food, the ancestor of the overhead broiler.
- "A very hot oven"425-450F. The warning about keeping the oven shut is the real point: steam from the butter is what raises the layers, and an early opening collapses them. Do not check before the pastry is set and coloured.
- Cutting and glazingEgg wash the top only; yolk running down the cut edge glues the layers together and stops the rise. "Glazing" in this entry means dusting the baked, emptied case with icing sugar and flashing it under high heat, which is for sweet cases only, not for savoury entrée fillings.
- ServingOne vol-au-vent from the reduced quantity above serves four to six as a first course, filled at the last moment so the base does not soften.
Puff paste was treated as a foundation skill, the sort of thing an English kitchen learned from French practice and then used for everything from patties to fruit tarts. The method described here, with its washed butter, letter folds and counted turns, is the one codified in the great Parisian kitchens of the early nineteenth century and carried into Britain by French-trained chefs such as Louis Eustache Ude and Charles Elmooks read very like this in tone. Vol-au-vent means, literally, "flight in the wind", a name for a case so light it might blow away; its invention is traditionally credited to Antonin Car"me, though the attribution is repeated more often than it is documented. The insistence that the paste be softer in summer and firmer in winter is a reminder that these instructions predate refrigeration: the pastry cook worked with the room temperature, and with a butter whose water content changed from churn to churn, rather than against them.