Puff Paste
Ingredients.
Half a pound of Flour.
Half a pound of fresh Butter.
Salt. Lemon-juice.
Take a clean cloth, and squeeze all the water out of the butter. Put the flour on a marble slab or a paste-board, in a heap; make a well in the centre, put in a pinch of salt, a teaspoonful of lemon-juice, and enough water to make a paste of the same consistency as the butter. Roll this paste out to a quarter of an inch in thickness.
Put the butter on half this paste, fold the other half over it, cover it entirely, and press the edges together with your thumb. Let this stand in a cool place for a quarter of an hour, then roll it out and fold it over in three; turn it with the rough edges towards you, roll it again, fold it in three, and put it aside for a quarter of an hour.
Repeat this until the paste has been rolled out seven times; it is then ready for use either for a vol-au-vent, or patties, or tartlets, or pie-crust,
A classic equal-weights puff paste — 8 oz flour to 8 oz butter — built by the French pâte feuilletée method. The whole thing hinges on keeping butter and dough at the same firmness at every stage.
- The hinge: matched consistencyThe instruction to add "enough water to make a paste of the same consistency as the butter" is the entire technique. If the détrempe is softer than the butter, the butter shatters into shards; if it is firmer, the butter squeezes out at the edges. Work the butter with your hands or a rolling pin until it is pliable but still cold, and match the dough to it.
- Weights and yieldHalf a pound each of flour and butter is roughly 225 g of each. The recipe does not measure the water; expect somewhere around 100-120 ml depending on your flour. Nor does it state a yield, but a pound of paste of this kind will cover a vol-au-vent case, a batch of small patties or a large pie lid.
- Squeezing the butterThe recipe calls for fresh (i.e. unsalted) butter, which was often noticeably wet; wringing it in a cloth removed water that would otherwise steam the layers apart unevenly. Modern block butter is drier, but European-style butter at 82-84% fat behaves best here. American butter at 80% is wetter and softer, so keep it colder.
- FlourUse plain (all-purpose) flour, not bread flour. Too much gluten makes the paste spring back and fight the roller; the lemon juice is there partly to relax it.
- Lemon juiceA teaspoonful of acid slightly weakens the gluten, and it was traditionally said to keep the paste from discolouring. Cream of tartar or plain white vinegar is generally used in the same way.
- Seven turnsSeven single turns (folds in three) is more than most modern recipes ask for -- six is the usual count, and beyond that the layers are generally reckoned to merge rather than multiply. The recipe rests the paste after every second turn; do the same for 15-20 minutes, refrigerated rather than merely "in a cool place", and stop if the butter starts to show through.
- Turning the rough edges towards youTurning the folded paste so the open, rough edge faces you before rolling again means each turn extends the paste in the alternate direction, which keeps the layers even. It is worth doing exactly as written.
- BakingThe original gives no oven, because it assumes you already know the dish you are filling. Puff paste wants a hot start: 425–450°F for the first 10–15 minutes to drive the steam and set the lift, then dropped to about 375°F to dry the interior. A cool oven melts the butter out before the layers can rise.
- MarbleThe marble slab is not affectation: it conducts heat away from the paste far faster than wood does, which is what keeps the butter firm. A chilled metal sheet or a granite worktop does the same.
Laminated pastry of this kind was already old when this book was written: recipes for repeatedly folded butter dough appear in French and English cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the invention is traditionally — though without documentation — credited to the painter Claude Lorrain in his apprentice days as a pastrycook. What marks this version as late-Victorian high-class cookery is its vocabulary and its assumptions. The dish names offered at the end — vol-au-vent, patties, tartlets — are the standard repertoire of the professional English kitchen working in the French manner, and the recipe presumes a marble slab, a cool larder and a cook with time to spare fifteen minutes seven times over. Puff paste was a test piece: a household that could produce it reliably was a household with a trained cook, and cookery books aimed at that market printed the method as a foundation to be referred back to rather than as a dish in itself.