Home › The Principles of Cookery › Transparent Pie-Crust
Transparent Pie-Crust
Take three-quarters of a pound of sweet fresh butter, break it into little pieces, and put it into a jar until it is quite melted without being oiled. Let it cool, and mix with it a well-beaten fresh egg and one pound of dried and sifted flour. Roll the paste very thin, line the tartlet-tins as quickly as possible, and bake the tarts in a well-heated oven. Just before putting them in brush them over with cold water, and sift a little powdered sugar over them. Time to bake, ten to fifteen minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 10d. for this quantity. Sufficient for two dishes of tarts.
A rich melted-butter paste, closer to a sweet short pastry than to anything flaky. The whole thing turns on the state of the butter when it goes into the flour.
- "Melted without being oiled"Melt the butter gently in a jar standing in hot water, so it softens to a thick cream rather than separating into clear fat and milky sediment. Butter that has split will not bind the flour and the paste turns greasy and crumbly. Let it cool until it is opaque and just pourable before the egg goes in.
- Quantities in modern termsThree-quarters of a pound of butter is 12 oz (340 g); a pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups (450 g). That is an unusually high fat ratio, which is why the pastry must be handled quickly and briefly.
- Dried flourVictorian cookery books commonly direct that flour be dried and sifted before use, damp flour being a real risk in an unheated larder. Modern bagged flour needs no drying — sift it and move on.
- LiquidOne egg is the only moisture in a pound of flour. Expect a stiff, slightly sandy dough; a tablespoon or two of cold water brings it together if it will not cohere. Do not knead it.
- "A well-heated oven"Read this as a brisk oven, somewhere around 400-425F (200-220C). Small, very short tartlet cases want quick heat so the butter sets the structure before it runs out of the pastry.
- Chill before rollingThe recipe sends the cases straight from tin to oven, but with this much butter a rest of 20 minutes in the refrigerator before baking will stop the pastry slumping down the sides of the tins.
- The water and sugar glazeBrushing with cold water and dusting with sifted sugar just before baking gives a crisp, faintly glassy top, which may be what the name points to. Use fine caster sugar and a light hand; granulated sits in gritty patches.
- Yield"Two dishes of tarts" is roughly 24 to 30 small tartlet cases, depending on tin size. Ten to fifteen minutes at that heat is accurate for shells this thin.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the British household dictionary, when a kitchen manual was expected to price every dish to the penny — 1s 10d here for a quantity that would fill two serving dishes. What "transparent" meant in Victorian pastry naming is not certain; it may point to the finish rather than the substance, a sugar-glazed crust baking to a thin, brittle sheet, alongside the transparent puddings and icings of the period. Melted-butter pastes like this one avoided the cold hands, cold room and labour that puff paste demanded, giving a rich short crust at the cost of any real flakiness. The instruction to line the tins "as quickly as possible" is the tell — in a kitchen heated by a coal range, a paste this fat would go soft in minutes.