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Puits D'Amour
Make a fine rich puff-paste, and roll it out thin. With tin shapes, made on purpose, cut it out, each size less than another. Lay the sizes in a pyramidical form; then bake in a moderate oven, that the paste may be done sufficiently, but very pale. Lay different-coloured sweetmeats on the edges.
A pastry construction rather than a filled dish: rings of puff paste in diminishing sizes, stacked into a well and baked pale. Almost everything depends on keeping the layers cold and the colour light.
- The hinge: keep it paleThe instruction to bake "very pale" is the point: browning would spoil the effect against the different-coloured sweetmeats laid on the edges. A "moderate oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F, but no time is given, so go by colour — cooked through and set, barely blond.
- "Tin shapes, made on purpose"Cutters sold graduated in size for the job; the recipe does not say what shape they were. A nested set of plain round cutters will give discs of decreasing diameter to lay up in a pyramid.
- StackingBrush a little water or eggwash between rings so they fuse, and set the largest at the bottom. Puff paste rises unevenly if the cut edge is dragged, so press cutters straight down rather than twisting.
- SweetmeatsIn this period the word covers candied and preserved fruit — angelica, candied peel, glacé cherries, stiff jellies such as redcurrant or quince — though it was also used of sugar confections such as comfits.
- Rest before bakingChill the assembled paste before it goes in. Warm puff paste slumps sideways as it rises.
- Yield and servingNo quantities are given at all.
Puits d'amour — "wells of love" — is a French pâtisserie whose name has been explained variously, sometimes by the sunken centre of the case and sometimes by a Paris well of that name; it is traditionally associated with eighteenth-century Paris, and the earliest printed versions are often credited, by tradition rather than settled evidence, to the court cook Vincent La Chapelle. The classic filling is redcurrant jelly, later displaced by pastry cream under a caramelised sugar crust; Cassell's version dispenses with a filling altogether and treats the dish as an ornamental centrepiece, a pale pyramid decorated with coloured preserves. A cook who could cut, stack and bake a set of puff-paste rings without letting them brown or topple was demonstrating technique as much as producing something to eat.