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To make paste for tarts
Put an ounce of loaf sugar, beat and sifted, to one pound of fine flour. Make it into a stiff paste, with a gill of boiling cream, and three ounces of putter. Work it well, and roll it very thin.
A lean, hot-liquid sweet pastry of the sort used for thin tart shells rather than a rich short crust. The whole method turns on working and rolling it while it is still warm.
- Roll it hotThe boiling cream carries the butter through the flour and swells some of the starch; the dough is pliable while warm and firms as it cools. Mix, work and roll in one continuous go, and line the tins before it stiffens.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz, in American measure; an imperial gill is 5 fl oz. Either will work here, but start at the lower figure and add the rest only if the flour will not come together into a stiff mass.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold as a hard cone, which is why it had to be beaten and sifted. Granulated or caster sugar is the direct replacement; one ounce to a pound of flour is about two tablespoons, so this is only faintly sweet.
- "Putter"Almost certainly a misprint for butter. Three ounces to the pound of flour is very lean by modern standards, where a sweet pastry would carry six to eight; expect a firm, biscuit-like shell rather than a flaky one.
- Weigh the flourA pound of "fine flour" is about 3½ cups of modern all-purpose, though period flour was softer. Weighing rather than scooping matters more than usual with a dough this dry.
- Work it wellThe instruction is deliberate and contrary to short-crust practice. Because the fat is already melted in, there is no flakiness to protect, and kneading gives the thin shell enough strength to hold a filling without slumping.
- OvenNo temperature is given. In a modern oven, 350-375F suits filled tarts; blind-baked empty shells take the same heat until sandy and pale gold, since the low sugar gives little browning.
- YieldRoughly a pound and a half of dough: enough for at least two 9-inch tarts, or two dozen or so small tartlet shells, rolled as thin as the recipe asks. The dough can be halved without trouble.
Pastry made with hot liquid rather than cold fat has a long history in English cookery, from the stiff flour-and-water "coffin" built to hold meat and its juices through a long bake down to the raised pork pies still made that way. This receipt sits at the polite end of that family: cream in place of water, a little butter, a spoonful of sugar, and an instruction to roll it very thin, all of which point at fruit and sweetmeat tarts rather than a standing pie. Loaf sugar sold as a hard cone, to be broken with nippers and then beaten and sifted, places the receipt in the long period before free-flowing granulated sugar was usual in domestic kitchens.