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To make a puff paste
Take a quarter of a peck of flour, and rub it into a pound of butter very fine. Make it up into a light paste with cold water just stiff enough to work it up. Then lay it out about as thick as a crown piece; put a layer of butter all over, then sprinkle on a little flour, double it up, and roll it out again. Double and roll it with layers of butter three times, and it will be fit for use.
An early rough-puff method: half the butter is rubbed in, the rest is folded through in layers. The proportions are generous by modern standards, and the whole thing hinges on keeping everything cold.
- A quarter of a peck of flourA dry peck is 8 quarts, so a quarter peck is 2 quarts of flour. Weight equivalents vary: reckoned by volume this is somewhere around 2 to 3 lb, though period trade weights for a peck of flour ran higher still. Either way it is a large batch; halving or quartering it is sensible for a domestic oven.
- The butter is not just the poundThe pound rubbed in is only the base. The three layers folded in afterwards are unmeasured, so the true total is unknowable from the text. Judge by covering the sheet thinly rather than by weight.
- As thick as a crown pieceA crown was a large silver coin a few millimetres thick, so this means rolling to about an eighth of an inch. Thinner than that and the butter breaks through the dough.
- Cold water, cold hands, cold roomNothing else in the recipe controls the result as much as temperature. If the butter softens into the flour rather than staying in sheets, the paste bakes short and dense instead of flaking. Chill the dough 20 to 30 minutes between the three foldings.
- Rubbing in "very fine"The first pound of butter should be worked to the texture of coarse crumbs — this is the tenderising fat. Only the layered butter creates the lift.
- Three turns, not sixModern puff pastry usually takes five or six folds; three gives a coarser, flakier rough puff, which is what this paste is. Do not add more turns expecting a finer result, as the butter will simply blend in.
- No oven temperature givenPuff paste needs high heat to turn its water to steam before the butter melts out: 425–450°F, dropping to 375°F once risen if the filling needs longer.
- YieldThe full quantity makes enough for several large covered pies or a great many small patties. Unbaked paste keeps two days refrigerated and freezes well.
Puff paste appears in English cookery books from the early seventeenth century and by the eighteenth was in common use for tarts, patties and small filled puffs. Recipes of this period rarely specify oven heat, because the cook was judging a brick or iron oven by hand and by such rough tests as how quickly flour scorched inside it; quantities in pecks and coins likewise assume a household buying flour in bulk and measuring against whatever was in the pocket. The two-stage method here — rub half the fat in, fold the rest through in layers — is what modern bakers call rough puff, and it survived in domestic use long after professional pastry cooks had moved to the single cold butter block and six turns.