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Entire Wheat Paste
1 cup fine Entire Wheat Flour 1/2 cup pastry flour 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons lard 1/2 cup butter Cold water Make same as Plain Paste. Roll to one-fourth inch in thickness, cut in finger-shaped pieces, bake, cool, brush over with slightly beaten white one egg diluted with one teaspoon cold water, and sprinkle with chopped nut meat seasoned with salt. Return to oven to slightly brown nut meats. Serve with salad course.
A whole-wheat pie paste turned into savoury cheese-straw-style fingers for the salad course. The recipe leans on a "Plain Paste" entry elsewhere in the book, so the method has to be reconstructed.
- The missing method"Make same as Plain Paste" points back to the book's own earlier pastry entry, which is not reproduced here. In outline it means the standard cold-fat procedure: mix the flours and salt, cut in the chilled lard and butter, then add cold water a little at a time until the dough just coheres. Add the water by feel rather than by measure; with this much fat it will take only a few tablespoons, though entire wheat flour tends to absorb a little more than white.
- Entire wheat flourAn older name for whole-wheat flour. "Fine" indicates a finely milled grind rather than a coarse graham; modern whole-wheat flour sold for bread is close enough, and whole-wheat pastry flour is closer still.
- Pastry flourA low-protein soft-wheat flour, around 8 to 9 percent protein. If you have none, use all-purpose and hold back a spoonful, or substitute a mix of all-purpose with a little cornstarch.
- Fat proportionThree tablespoons lard plus half a cup butter is about 11 tablespoons of fat to 1 1/2 cups flour, which is a very rich, short paste. Keep everything cold and handle it as little as possible or the fingers will spread instead of holding their shape.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake these at 400F, on the pastry side of hot, for 12 to 15 minutes until set and lightly coloured; the second pass to toast the nuts needs only 4 to 6 minutes at the same heat.
- Two bakingsThe fingers are baked and cooled before the egg-white glaze goes on, exactly as the recipe directs. No reason is given for the cooling; letting the pastry set and firm before it is brushed is the likely intent.
- NutsAny firm nut works; almonds, pecans and English walnuts all appear commonly in cookbooks of this era. The recipe has the chopped nut meat seasoned with salt before it is sprinkled on.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dimensions for the fingers and no count, so yield depends entirely on how they are cut; this quantity of dough rolled to a quarter inch will give a couple of dozen or more.
Pastry served with the salad course, rather than as dessert, was a feature of American and English formal dinners around 1900, when the salad arrived late in the meal and wanted something crisp and salty beside it. Entire wheat flour appears in cookbooks of this era as part of a broader enthusiasm for whole grains, promoted by health reformers and by the domestic-science schools that shaped books like this one; using it in pastry, where white flour was the assumed default, was a small piece of that argument. The construction here -- bake plain, glaze with egg white, dress with a savoury topping, then return to the oven -- follows the same logic as the cheese straw, with nuts in place of cheese.