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Pastry (One pound fresh butter one)
One pound fresh butter, one quart flour. Make up the dough with ice water. Divide the butter into parts. Roll out, and cover thickly with one part of the butter. Continue till all is rolled, sifting flour each time. Don't handle much, or it will be heavy.-Mrs. W.
Pastry.
Mix with water one quart flour and two teaspoonfuls salt. Work well and roll out thin. Spread over with lard, sift flour over the dough, and cut it in strips of two inches. Lay them in a pile one above another, cut them in squares, and again pile them up. Press down with the hands, and roll out thin as before. Repeat this several times, and the pastry will be improved each time. Do not use your hands after the roller is applied.
Two versions of rough puff pastry, printed back to back: the first enriched with a full pound of butter, the second a plainer lard paste built by stacking and folding. Neither gives an oven temperature or a yield, because both were understood as components rather than finished dishes.
- The quart of flourA quart of flour measured by volume is about 4 cups, somewhere in the region of 1 to 1 1/4 lb (450-560 g) depending on how it is scooped and whether it was sifted first. Weigh it if you can; the butter-to-flour ratio in the first recipe is close to 1:1, which is a genuine puff paste, not a pie dough.
- The hinge: keep everything cold"Don't handle much, or it will be heavy" is the whole method. The butter must stay in sheets between layers of dough, not smear into it. Ice water is specified for that reason, and if the butter begins to soften at any point, the dough goes back in the refrigerator for 20 minutes before the next roll.
- SaltThe first recipe omits it entirely, though the second calls for two teaspoonfuls. With modern unsalted butter, add about 1 teaspoon of fine salt to the flour.
- "Divide the butter into parts"The recipe does not say how many; three or four is a reasonable choice, one per rolling. In modern terms a turn means rolling to a rectangle, spreading with the butter, folding, and giving the dough a quarter turn before the next roll, though the recipe prescribes no particular fold.
- The second recipe's cut-and-stack turnCutting the greased sheet into 2-inch strips, piling them, cutting again into squares and piling those is a way of forcing many layers without a formal book fold. Press the stack firmly before rolling, as the recipe itself directs, or trapped air may make the finished pastry blister unevenly.
- LardLeaf lard gives the flakiest result and is worth seeking out. Supermarket lard is blander; shortening behaves similarly but produces a paler, less crisp crust.
- "Do not use your hands after the roller is applied"Warm palms are the enemy of laminated dough. Use the pin, a bench scraper and a light dusting of flour brushed off between turns; excess flour left between layers makes the baked pastry dry.
- Oven and yieldNo temperature or yield is given. Puff paste wants a hot oven; 425-450F will let the water in the butter flash to steam before the fat melts out. Either quantity makes roughly enough paste for two double-crust pies, or a batch of small tarts or patty shells.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (copyright 1878, commonly printed as 1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, which is why the first paste carries the tag "Mrs. W." and reads like dictation rather than a formal method. Recipes of this kind assume the cook already knows what puff paste is for and needs only the proportions and the household's preferred number of turns. The two versions side by side offer a choice of fats: butter in one, lard in the other, lard being the cheaper and more reliably available fat on a farm that kept hogs. The second recipe builds its layers by cutting and stacking rather than by the tidy three-fold turn taught today.