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Crisp à la Russe
Roll Puff Paste one eighth inch thick. Cut in strips two inches wide and four inches long. Spread one half with jam or jelly, fold over other half, press edges together, bake in hot oven. Brush with white of egg, sprinkle with almonds. Brown in oven.
A jam turnover in puff paste, glazed and almond-crusted at the end rather than the beginning. The whole thing hinges on sealed edges and a genuinely hot oven.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs that heat so the water in the butter layers flashes to steam before the fat melts out; a moderate oven gives flat, greasy pastry.
- Puff PasteThe book means a made-from-scratch laminated dough of flour and butter. A 14 oz sheet of all-butter frozen puff paste, thawed in the refrigerator and rolled to 1/8 inch, behaves the same way here.
- Keep it coldRoll, cut, fill and seal, then chill the assembled strips 20 minutes before baking. Warm, slack dough will not rise and will leak.
- Filling and sealingAbout 2 teaspoons of thick jam per strip, kept a half inch clear of the edges. Press with a fork or brush the border with water first; a thin, runny jelly will boil out and weld the pastry to the pan, so use a firm preserve and bake on parchment.
- The two-stage glazeAs written, the pastry bakes first, then gets the egg white and almonds and goes back to brown. Figure roughly 15-18 minutes until well risen and pale gold, then glaze, sprinkle and return for another 5-6 minutes. Glazing at the start risks gluing the cut edges and may blunt the rise.
- AlmondsBlanched almonds, shredded or coarsely chopped, or sliced almonds from a bag. They scorch quickly under the second heat, so watch the last few minutes. Some cooks add a dusting of sugar with them, though the recipe does not call for it; it is the egg white that holds them on.
- YieldNot stated, and it depends on how much dough you roll out; a standard sheet of puff paste rolled to 1/8 inch will give a dozen or so strips of the size specified. Serve warm the day they are made; the pastry softens overnight.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most company-published cookbooks of the early 1900s it mixes promotional chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire. The tag à la Russe was doing heavy duty on American and English menus of the period, attached to anything from salads to charlottes; it is often said to have borrowed the prestige of service à la russe, the fashion of serving a dinner in successive courses rather than setting all the dishes out at once, and by 1900 it often meant little more than "stylish." The pastry itself is the familiar European jam turnover, close kin to the French jalousie and to the almond-topped puff pastries sold in bakeries across northern Europe. What marks it as a book of its moment is the assumption that a home cook had puff paste on hand as a matter of course.