Home › Miscellaneous Recipes › Puff Pastry
Puff Pastry
1 tablespoonful lemon juice Cold water Wash the butter in cold water and squeeze it in a floured towel into a flat cake. Sift the flour into an earthenware basin, rub two heaping tablespoonfuls of the butter finely into it. Beat up the yolk of the egg with the lemon juice and a little cold water, add them gradually to the flour and butter, making them into a firm paste. Roll out the paste into a long strip, lay the butter on one end of it, wet the edge slightly, and fold the paste over. Fasten the edges well together, turn round, press with the rolling pin, and roll out lengthways; have the paste so that the two open edges are parallel with yourself after folding it in three. Roll from you and never from side to side, using gentle pressure. Then fold in three. Now put the
The page is defective: the ingredient list has lost all but the lemon juice and cold water, and the method breaks off mid-sentence at the second turn. What survives is a perfectly recognisable English puff paste, and the surviving instructions are the ones that matter.
- The missing quantitiesOnly "1 tablespoonful lemon juice," cold water and one egg yolk are legible; the flour and butter weights are gone. Standard puff paste of this period is equal weights of flour and butter, with about half the flour's weight in liquid, and two heaping tablespoonfuls of the butter (something on the order of 2 oz) is rubbed into the flour at the start. Treat that as a reconstruction, not as the book's own figure.
- Washing the butterKneading butter under cold water and wringing it in a floured cloth removes buttermilk and surplus water from what was then unstandardised farm butter. Modern unsalted butter is already near 82 percent fat and consistent; the step can be skipped, and the flouring is only to keep the block from sticking.
- Earthenware basinSpecified because it stays cold and does not conduct warmth from the hands the way tin or enamel does. A chilled metal or glass bowl serves the same purpose.
- Temperature is the hingeEverything here depends on the butter staying firm but pliable and the dough staying cool. If butter breaks through the paste or the layers start to slide, stop and refrigerate 20 to 30 minutes before continuing. Warm butter absorbs into the dough and you get shortcrust, not leaves.
- "Roll from you and never from side to side"Sound advice and the reason the book insists the two folded edges lie parallel to the worker after each fold. Rolling only lengthways keeps the butter layers even and stops them being squeezed out at the sides.
- How many turnsThe text stops after the first fold in three. English practice of the period commonly ran to six or seven turns in all, with the paste rested in a cold place at intervals; the book's own number is lost.
- BakingNo oven is given because the page is cut. Modern practice for puff paste is a hot oven, in the region of 425 to 450F, so that the moisture in the dough and butter turns to steam before the fat melts out; a slack oven gives greasy, flat pastry. The temperature is not the book's.
- YieldThe quantities are gone, so any yield is guesswork; on an assumed 8 oz of flour a batch of this kind would cover a couple of large casseroles, or be cut into small patty cases.
Puff paste is the pastry cook's showpiece: alternating leaves of dough and butter that lift on their own steam, known in French as feuilletage and generally traced to French pastry kitchens of the seventeenth century, though laminated doughs of some sort are far older and much argued over. Its appearance in a book of casserole cookery is practical rather than ornamental. The casserole was being promoted in the early twentieth century as the economical, self-contained way to cook, and a lid of puff paste turned a plain braise of meat and gravy into something fit to carry to table, or supplied the vol-au-vent cases and patty shells into which the same mixture could be spooned. The insistence on cold hands, a cold basin and a cold room reflects a period before domestic refrigeration, when pastry was made early in the morning in the coolest part of the house and washing the butter was a real necessity rather than a nicety.