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Puff Paste
IF you have a marble slab to work on when making puff paste, your work will be easier. A rolling-pin with movable handles makes the touch lighter. There can be no heavyhanded methods, or you will have a solid, indigestible substance. Scald an earthen bowl, fill with ice water; wash your hands in hot water, then in cold. Work 1 pound butter in a bowl cold water until it is waxy and nearly all the salt is washed out of it. Take out the butter, pat and squeeze till the water flies. Measure from it 2 level tablespoonfuls, mold the rest into an oblong cake, then set it where it will grow hard and cold. Sift 1 pound flour with teaspoonful salt into the bowl. Rub between the fingers and thumb the 2 tablespoonfuls butter. Mix with ice water, stirring constantly till you have a soft dough.
Turn out on a marble slab, which has been dusted with flour. Knead with an even, light touch, till it feels elastic; then cover with a napkin, and set away to " ripen" five minutes.
When the dough is ripened, you may begin work on it. Put the paste on the slab and, with the lightest possible pats from the rolling-pin, shape it about half as wide as it is long, keeping the corners square. At one end lay the hardened piece of butter.
Over this fold the rest of the dough.
Tuck lightly around the edges, inclosing all the air possible. With light taps from the rolling-pin break up the butter, spreading it and rolling the paste into a longer strip. Be careful to keep the sides and ends of the paste even, and to break as few air bubbles as possible. When the strip is almost as long as the slab, fold it like the letter Z, and begin again rolling, folding, and turning until the process has been repeated six times. If the paste shows the least symptom of being soft, or the butter of breaking through, set it away to chill before you finish the process.
Roll always in one direction, from you, with a long, sweeping motion.
By cutting the paste across after the work is completed, you may see the texture which gives you a crust eight times as high after baking as before it was set in an oven. You will notice layer after layer of a waferlike thickness of butter and paste with tiny bubbles between. Wrap it in parchment paper and set away in a covered dish overnight. It will be all the more tender and flaky for twenty-four hours of "ripening." During the winter a batch of puff paste, wrapped and covered, may be kept for several weeks in a very cold place. Use it as desired, baking patés, vol au vents, or tarts as required. These will keep five or six days after making, being reheated before they are filled.
The oven for baking puff paste should be as hot as for rolls, with the greatest heat underneath, so the pate can rise to its full height before browning. As heat touches the pastry the bubbles expand, lifting the thin layers higher and higher. When it has reached its height, and is baked delicately brown, you have what is properly called puff paste.
NOTES ABOUT PUFF PASTE When using a cutter, always dip in flour between each cutting; it will insure neat edges.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK If the work has to be done in a warm room, chill the paste between three pans, the upper one filled with broken ice, the second one set into another large pan, also filled with ice.
Puff paste is always in good condition if it slips easily on the slab. Should you wish to use is for a pie, bake it vol-au-vent fashion over the bottom of a pie-plate first, and fill after baking, or use ordinary pie paste for the bottom when the filling is to be baked.
Build up the sides with puff paste; rich pastry never makes a good undercrust-it soaks.
When baking small pieces such as paté tops or cheese straws, do not put them in a pan with the larger pieces; they bake in less than half the time required by the others.
If you wish pastry to have a glazed appearance, brush over with beaten egg before putting it in the oven.
Utilize trimmings for smaller things; never add them to the larger pieces of paste.
Use the sharpest knife for cutting pastry; if it is dragged ever so slightly in the cutting it will not rise well. Also, in making two layers of pastry adhere, never press it together or you will have a heavy spot.
Always have puff paste ice cold when it is put in the oven. Let the heat be greatest at the bottom when the paste is put in; it must rise before it begins to brown. PUFF-PASTE DAINTIES Vol au Vent. trimmings stars, hearts, crescents, or any forms you can produce with a paste jagger. Brush the paste on the saucer lightly with cold water, and stick on the ornaments in any style desired. Chill the vol au vent and lid for half an hour, then bake in an oven which is very hot at first, but cooled slightly when the pastry has risen and is beginning to brown.
Watch the baking with great care, as the paste will burn or become unshapely if not turned occasionally. A vol au vent may be filled with any cream mixture or with a cooked, chilled fruit and rich sirup.
This is classic French feuilletage at a full 1:1 butter-to-flour ratio, written for a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. The method holds up; most of the adaptation is about temperature control and about butter that no longer needs washing.
- The hinge: keep everything coldEvery instruction here serves one end — the butter must stay solid and separate from the dough, in continuous sheets, until the oven melts it and its water flashes to steam. The moment the butter softens enough to blend into the flour, stop and chill the block for 20-30 minutes. A warm kitchen means an extra rest between every turn, not a faster hand.
- Washing the butterWorking butter in ice water to drive out salt and buttermilk was necessary when butter was heavily salted and variable. Use unsalted butter and skip it. If you want the pliability the washing produced, beat the cold butter briefly between sheets of parchment until it bends without cracking.
- Pound and poundOne pound flour to one pound butter, minus the two tablespoons rubbed into the détrempe. That is roughly 3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour and 4 sticks of butter. Ice water will run about 3/4 to 1 cup depending on the flour; add it gradually to a soft, not sticky, dough.
- "Ripen" means restThe five-minute rest after kneading and the overnight rest at the end both let the gluten relax so the paste rolls without springing back. The overnight rest is worth doing; the dough rolls out longer and shrinks less in the oven.
- Six turnsRoll, fold in three (the "letter Z"), give the block a quarter turn, repeat — six times in all. Roll away from you in one direction so the layers stretch evenly. Chill 30 minutes after every second turn.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figures; "as hot as for rolls" would be somewhere in the region of a hot oven, around 425F. The direction to put the greatest heat underneath reflects a coal or wood range; in a modern oven, preheat a baking stone or heavy sheet on a low rack and set the pastry pan directly on it. Ease the heat back once the pastry has risen and started to colour, as the vol-au-vent note itself advises.
- StorageSeveral weeks in a cold larder is not the same as several weeks in a refrigerator. Keep wrapped dough three or four days chilled, or freeze it up to three months. Baked shells hold two or three days in a tin and crisp again at 350F for five minutes.
- YieldThe book gives no yield. A pound of flour with a pound of butter and the water will come to something over two pounds of paste — enough for a large vol-au-vent case plus trimmings, or a couple of dozen small patty shells.
- The vol-au-vent paragraph is incompleteThe text as printed jumps from the heading straight to decorating with trimmings; the instruction for cutting and stacking the case over an inverted saucer has dropped out. Use a standard vol-au-vent method: two rounds of paste, the top cut with a smaller ring to make the lid, chilled hard before baking.
Puff paste — pâte feuilletée — is the aristocrat of the pastry family, and by the time this appeared in a turn-of-the-century American household compendium (credited here to Mrs. Curtis's cookbook) it was the standard by which a cook's touch was judged. Its invention is traditionally attributed to the painter Claude Gellée, apprenticed to a pastrycook, though that story is folklore rather than record; layered butter doughs are far older and appear in various forms across medieval Europe and the Near East. What the writing tells you plainly is the state of the American kitchen around 1900: no mechanical refrigeration, so the cook nests pans of broken ice to chill the dough; butter still salted for keeping, so it must be washed; and a coal range with fierce bottom heat, which is exactly what puff paste wants. The confidence about keeping a batch "several weeks in a very cold place" during winter belongs to a house with an unheated pantry, not a refrigerator.