Home › Pastry › One Egg (Teaspoonful of Castor Sugar)
One Egg (Teaspoonful of Castor Sugar)
One teaspoonful of Castor Sugar.
Put the flour into a basin with the sugar and mix in the baking-powder; rub the butter into the flour with your hands; add the yolk of egg and enough cold water to make a stiff paste. Put the paste on a floured board and roll it out to a quarter of an inch in thickness. It is now ready for use for tarts, turnovers, or baked dumplings.
A plain enriched short crust, of the sort Victorian and Edwardian cookery schools taught as a base for fruit tarts and turnovers. The excerpt as printed carries only the sugar quantity in its heading, so the proportions have to be reconstructed from the method.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the egg and the teaspoonful of sugar are specified; flour, butter and baking powder are named in the method but never measured. A standard short crust of this type runs to about 8 oz flour, 4-5 oz butter, 1 teaspoon baking powder, one egg yolk and 2-3 tablespoons cold water. Treat that as a reconstruction, not the author's figure.
- Castor sugarBritish caster sugar, finer than granulated and coarser than confectioners'. Granulated works here since the quantity is a single teaspoon and it dissolves in the water.
- Egg yolk onlyThe yolk enriches and colours the pastry without the water content of the white, which would toughen it. Save the white for meringue or for glazing the finished tart.
- Baking powder in pastryNot usual in modern short crust, but common in period recipes, where it lightens a crust made with a lower proportion of fat. If you are using a generous 5 oz butter to 8 oz flour, leave it out.
- The hinge: keep everything coldRubbing in with the hands warms the butter faster than a cook expects. Work quickly, use cold butter and iced water, and stop while the mixture is still loose and crumbly rather than pasty; shortness comes from the fat coating the flour, so over-rubbing into a smooth mass is what costs you the texture.
- Rest before rollingThe original goes straight from basin to board. Half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and makes a quarter-inch sheet far easier to roll without shrinkage in the oven.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the pastry is a component. For tarts and turnovers bake at 400-425F; a covered baked dumpling is better at 375-400F so the fruit inside cooks through.
- YieldAt the proportions above, enough for one 8-9 inch tart case, or roughly six turnovers or dumplings.
Short crust of this kind was the workhorse of the English pastry cupboard, and period cookery books generally opened their pastry chapter with a plain paste before moving on to puff and flaky. The egg yolk marks it out as a slightly richer version than the water-and-fat crust used for meat pies; the addition of baking powder points to the period when chemical raising agents had become cheap and reliable enough to appear in places later cooks would think odd. Why the heading names only the egg and the sugar is not recoverable from the excerpt as printed.