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Galettes
Ingredients.
One pound of Household Flour.
One pound of Vienna Flour.
One ounce of Yeast.
Half an ounce of Castor Sugar.
Half a pint of Milk (warmed).
Half a pound of Butter.
The book gives the ingredients only, with no method attached — a common shorthand in Victorian professional manuals, where the pastry cook was assumed to know how an enriched yeast dough is handled. What follows covers the units, the two flours, and what the proportions tell you about the intended treatment.
- No method is givenThis is an ingredient list, not a set of instructions. Treat it as a formula to be read against a modern enriched-dough or yeast-puff recipe rather than something to follow step by step.
- Vienna flourA strong, finely dressed wheat flour associated with Austrian and Hungarian milling; the nearest modern equivalent is probably bread flour or a high-protein white. "Household flour" is ordinary plain or all-purpose flour. Combining the two would give more gluten than plain flour alone, though the book does not say why both are specified.
- Yeast quantityOne ounce means fresh compressed yeast, about 28 g, for 2 lb of flour. That corresponds to roughly 3 teaspoons of instant dried yeast. Compressed yeast varied in strength, and quantities in period recipes are often generous by modern standards.
- Castor sugarSuperfine or caster sugar. Half an ounce is about a tablespoon for 2 lb of flour, so this is a barely sweetened dough; the small amount suggests the sugar is there to feed the yeast rather than to flavour, though the book does not say so.
- Half a pint of milkAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Warmed means blood heat, not hot; well under 110F.
- The butter is the pointThe butter -- Half a pound of butter to two pounds of flour is a quarter of the flour weight: a rich dough, though not extraordinarily so. The book gives no method, so whether the butter was folded in cold or worked in soft cannot be determined from the list.
- YieldTwo pounds of flour is a bakery-scale batch, and the quantities halve cleanly. The book gives no yield or size.
A galette is simply a flat round cake, from the Old French galet, a smooth pebble — the name has been applied to everything from buckwheat pancakes in Brittany to the puff-pastry galette des rois eaten at Epiphany, and to rich yeast-raised discs like this one. The specification of "Vienna flour" alongside ordinary household flour is suggestive, if not conclusive, of a date in the later nineteenth century, when Viennese bread and the strong, finely milled flours associated with it were the prestige benchmark in British and French bakeries after the Vienna bakery at the 1867 Paris Exposition drew wide attention. Books of this kind were written for cooks in large houses and for the pupils of cookery schools, and here the method is abbreviated: the reader was expected to know that two pounds of flour to half a pound of butter, lifted with yeast, meant a folded dough.