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Lemon Crisps
Cut Puff Paste in strips four inches long and one inch wide, rolled one fourth inch in thickness. Arrange in pairs with Lemon Filling between.
This is an assembly note rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have Lowney's Puff Paste and Lemon Filling to hand, and that you know puff paste strips must be baked before anything is put between them. The whole thing lives or dies on the pastry.
- Bake the strips firstThe instruction to "arrange in pairs with Lemon Filling between" describes the finished pastry, not a raw one. Bake the cut strips, cool them completely, then sandwich; filling put between raw layers turns the interior to paste.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperature or time here. Puff paste is generally baked in a hot oven, in modern terms somewhere around 425-450F, so that the water in the butter layers turns to steam before the fat melts out. Strips this size are likely to want somewhere in the range of 12-20 minutes, until deep gold through, not merely risen.
- Keep everything coldChill the cut strips at least 30 minutes before baking. Warm paste slumps and the layers weld rather than lift.
- CuttingUse a sharp knife or wheel and press straight down. Dragging or twisting the blade seals the cut edge and the strips rise crooked. Prick them lightly if you want a flatter, more manageable sandwich.
- What the dimensions becomeQuarter-inch paste may rise to an inch or more depending on how well the lamination has been made, so a paired crisp will stand up appreciably tall. Trim the baked strips to matching lengths before filling if they have spread unevenly.
- The lemon fillingThe book's Lemon Filling is a separate recipe elsewhere in the volume; period lemon fillings of this kind are typically thickened with cornstarch or flour and egg rather than being butter-rich curds. Whatever is used must be cold and fully set before it goes in, or it will run out the sides. Any thick lemon curd stands in.
- Yield and timingA pound of puff paste rolled to this thickness gives roughly a dozen finished pairs. Fill within a couple of hours of serving; the pastry softens quickly once the moist filling is against it.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, is a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume that grew into a general household cookbook, which is why its dessert chapter ranges well beyond cocoa. Terse cross-referencing entries like this one were standard practice in American cookbooks of the period: the puff paste and the lemon filling each had their own recipe elsewhere in the book, and the author saw no reason to repeat them. The result resembles a domestic version of the bakery mille-feuille or napoleon, a pastry generally traced to French patisserie and long since naturalised in English and American kitchens.