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Sugar Paste, for Tarts, Etc
Rub four ounces of fresh butter into a pound of flour; add a little salt and three ounces of sugar. Work the whole into a smooth paste with an egg and a little water. Use as required.
A lean sweet pastry of the old English school — half the butter a modern pâte sucrée would carry, which makes it sturdy enough to line a tart ring and hold fruit without collapsing.
- The quantities in metric and cupsOne pound of flour is about 450 g, or roughly 3 1/2 cups; 4 oz butter is 115 g (one US stick) and 3 oz sugar is 85 g, a scant half cup. This makes a large batch, enough for two 9-inch tart shells with trimmings to spare, so halving is sensible.
- Rub in, do not cream"Rub four ounces of fresh butter into a pound of flour" means fingertips or a pastry blender until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Butter straight from the refrigerator, cut small, gives the flakiest result; a food processor pulsed ten or twelve times does the same work.
- Water by feel"A little water" is one of two amounts the recipe leaves unmeasured (the salt is the other), and it varies with your flour and the size of the egg. Start with a tablespoon beyond the beaten egg and add more only until the dough coheres when pressed — at this low fat ratio it will feel firmer and drier than a modern sweet crust.
- Rest itThe recipe says nothing about resting, but wrap the paste and chill it at least 30 minutes before rolling. The gluten relaxes, which helps keep the shell from shrinking down the sides of the tin.
- "Fresh butter"This is period usage for unsalted, freshly churned butter, as opposed to the heavily salted keeping butter sold from tubs. Use unsalted and add the little salt the recipe calls for.
- Baking, since the recipe gives noneSugar in a pastry means it colours early. Blind bake lined shells at 375–400°F (190–200°C) for 15 to 20 minutes, and watch the rim; a filled tart is better started hot and finished at 350°F.
- Rolling a sweet pasteSugar makes the dough more fragile and more prone to sticking than plain short crust. Roll it between sheets of parchment, or on a lightly floured board working quickly, and patch any tears with scraps rather than re-rolling.
Sugar paste of this kind sits between two older traditions: the plain flour-and-water "coffin" that medieval cooks used chiefly as a baking vessel, and the rich almond and gum sugar pastes used for confectionery and ornamental work — a name that still survives in Britain for rolled fondant icing. By the time Cassell's dictionary was compiled in the later nineteenth century, the term had settled into its workaday sense of a sweetened short crust for fruit tarts, tartlets and jam turnovers. The modest proportion of butter is characteristic of the period and of British domestic economy generally; richer French pastry formulas, with higher fat and a yolk rather than a whole egg, are a later arrival in English-language home cookbooks.