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Half an Egg
A little Water.
One teaspoonful of Lemon Juice.
A pinch of Salt.
Put the flour in a basin, add the salt, and rub in the butter until quite smooth. Then moisten with the egg, the lemon juice, and a very little water. Mix the whole thoroughly, and work into a smooth but stiff paste. Use as directed.
This is a pastry paste rather than a finished dish, and the page as printed has lost the head of its ingredient list — the flour and butter quantities are gone, along with all but the tail end of the egg. What survives is the method, which is a standard rich short paste for savoury cases.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "a little water", a teaspoon of lemon juice, a pinch of salt and half an egg are given; the flour and butter amounts belong to the lines that were cut off. Any figure offered here would be invention. Work from a rich short paste you already trust — something in the region of 8 oz flour to 4-5 oz butter is one workable proportion for pastry of this kind — and use the method below.
- Half an eggBeat a whole egg thoroughly with a fork and use half of it by volume, about 1½ tablespoons. Keep the rest for glazing the cases.
- "Rub in the butter until quite smooth"This is the hinge. Unlike puff or flaky pastry, where the fat is kept in visible pieces, here the butter is worked completely into the flour before any liquid goes in. That coating of fat is what keeps the baked case short and crisp rather than tough, and it is why the dough tolerates being kneaded into a smooth paste afterwards.
- Water, sparingly"A very little water" means what it says — a teaspoon or two at most, added only if the egg alone will not bring the dough together. A slack paste will shrink and slump in small moulds.
- Why the lemon juiceAcid is traditionally held to relax the gluten slightly, so the paste rolls thin without springing back. Vinegar is the usual substitute if you have no lemon.
- Rest before rollingThe original says nothing about chilling. Wrap and refrigerate 30 minutes before rolling, and again after lining tartlet tins or croustade moulds.
- "Use as directed"The paste is a lining paste, presumably cross-referred from other recipes; the page itself does not say which. For small tartlet tins, boat moulds or croustade cases, bake blind by modern practice at about 400F, weighted with beans, until the edges colour — roughly 12-15 minutes, with a few more minutes uncovered to dry the base.
- YieldA paste made on an 8 oz flour proportion will line somewhere in the region of a dozen to two dozen small tartlet cases, depending on the mould.
The savoury was the last course but one at a formal late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, served after the sweet and before dessert fruit: a few mouthfuls of something salty, hot and small — anchovy, cheese, marrow, roe, mushroom — very often carried in a pastry case. That is why a book of this period keeps a working paste recipe on hand rather than among the pastries, and why the instruction ends simply "use as directed": the paste was infrastructure, to be referred back to from elsewhere in the book. The style itself, a short paste enriched with egg and acidulated with lemon, is often associated with the professional French kitchen tradition thought to have shaped British high-class cookery of the era, where doughs were classified by function and cooks were expected to know a lining paste from a flaky one without being told.