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Puff Paste
Wash 1 cup butter, shape in circular piece, reserve 1 tablespoon, and put remainder in pan between two pans of ice. Work the reserved butter into 1 1/2 cups bread flour, mix to a dough with 5/8 cup ice water, knead 5 minutes, cover and let stand 5 minutes. Pat and roll 1/4 inch thick, keeping corners square. Place butter in center of one side of pastry, fold other side over butter, fold one end over butter, other end under butter, pressing edges together. Turn 1/4 way round, pat, lift, roll 1/4 inch thick, fold in 3 layers and turn. Repeat 4 times, chilling between pans of ice when necessary, and folding the last time in 4 layers. Chill, roll out, shape, chill again and bake in hot oven, reducing heat after pastry has risen.
A classic full puff paste, laminated by hand with butter kept just below the point where it would soften into the dough. The instructions are terse but complete; what they assume is a cold kitchen and a marble slab.
- Temperature is the whole recipeThe butter block and the dough must stay at the same firm-but-pliable consistency throughout. If butter softens it merges into the dough and no layers form; if it is rock hard it shatters and tears through. Refrigerate 20-30 minutes between turns rather than working through resistance.
- "Wash the butter"Knead the butter in a bowl of ice water, pressing out the buttermilk and rinsing off surface salt, then squeeze dry. This was standard when butter was locally churned and inconsistently salted. With modern unsalted butter of known moisture content the step can be skipped, though a brief working of the cold butter still makes it more pliable.
- Two pans of iceA pan set on ice with another pan of ice on top: an improvised chiller for a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. A sheet pan in the refrigerator does the same job.
- 5/8 cup waterTen tablespoons, a little over half a cup. Hold back a tablespoon and add it only if the dough will not come together; flour hydration varies.
- Bread flourCalled for deliberately, for the gluten strength needed to survive repeated rollings without tearing. The five-minute rest after kneading matters, and a second rest is worth taking if the dough fights the pin.
- Counting the turnsThe first fold encases the butter; then five more rollings and foldings, the last in four layers rather than three -- a few hundred layers in all. Keep the corners square and the edges straight or the layers end up uneven at the rim.
- "Hot oven, reducing heat"The book gives no temperatures; a "hot oven" of this period is usually taken as roughly 425-450F, hot enough that steam forms fast and lifts the layers, with the heat reduced once the pastry has risen so the interior dries out instead of collapsing.
- Yield and handlingThe recipe gives no yield; the ingredients come to something over a pound of paste. Cut shapes with a sharp cutter pressed straight down, never twisted, and chill the cut shapes before baking.
Puff paste of this kind — flour-and-water dough wrapped around a solid block of butter and folded repeatedly — is generally traced to French pastry practice of the seventeenth century, and by the time American cooking schools took it up it was the recognized test of a pastry cook's hands. Alice Bradley, who directed Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston, was writing for hostesses assembling luncheons and suppers where the fashionable service was the patty shell or vol-au-vent: a crisp hollow case filled with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, lobster or mushrooms. The brevity of these instructions is a period signal. She compresses into one paragraph what a modern author would spread over several pages of photographs. The recipe also quietly records a kitchen without a freezer and often without much refrigeration at all, where the cook's tools against warmth were a block of ice, a stone slab and speed.