Puff Paste
cold water 1 pound flour Shape and flatten butter into a round cake. Chill.
Sift flour several times; add cold water to form a dough a little stiffer than for baking powder biscuit. Chill. Place butter in same way as directed in Plain Paste and roll paste seven times. Chill if necessary between each rolling.
A classic full puff paste in the pre-war American style: equal weights of butter and flour, with cold water as the only other ingredient. The transcription has lost part of its ingredient list, so read it as a method rather than a formula.
- ProportionsThe ingredient line was checked against the printed page and matches what our text now gives. For a puff paste of this type, butter equals the flour in weight, so 1 pound butter to 1 pound flour (roughly 3 1/2 to 4 cups); the water runs to about a cup, added by feel until the dough is a little stiffer than biscuit dough.
- The hinge: temperatureButter and dough must be the same firmness, both cold. If the butter is harder than the paste it shatters into shards and the layers break; if softer it smears and the paste bakes flat and greasy. "Chill if necessary between each rolling" should be read as "chill between each rolling," 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator.
- "Roll paste seven times"Best read as seven turns rather than seven passes of the pin; the enclosing and folding method is the one given under Plain Paste, which this recipe does not repeat. Modern practice usually stops at about six.
- Stiffness gauge"A little stiffer than for baking powder biscuit" means a firm, smooth dough that holds a fingermark without slumping — closer to pasta dough than to a soft biscuit dough.
- FlourA soft pastry flour suits this paste; unbleached all-purpose works, while bread flour makes it elastic and hard to roll. The repeated sifting aerated the flour and broke up lumps, and is largely optional now.
- ButterUse unsalted butter, and a high-fat European-style butter if you can find it: the lower water content makes the paste easier to handle and less prone to toughening.
- OvenThe book gives no temperature. Puff paste wants a hot oven — 425-450F for the first 15 minutes to drive the steam and lift the layers, then dropped to about 350F to dry the interior. A slow start will melt the butter out before the layers set.
- YieldA pound of flour makes roughly 2 1/2 lb of paste — enough for two large tarts, a couple of dozen patty shells, or several sheets of vol-au-vent. It freezes well after the final turn.
Puff paste of this kind — a book of butter enclosed in a lean water dough and folded through repeated turns — is generally traced to French pâtisserie, where it appears as pâte feuilletée, and it entered American cookbooks as the prestige pastry against which a cook was judged. Lowney's Cook Book, issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to promote its chocolate, sets it alongside a "Plain Paste" that uses less butter and fewer turns; the cross-reference here assumes the reader has already learned the enclosing technique there. The repeated instruction to chill is the tell of the period: before mechanical refrigeration was standard in the home, a cook worked against the kitchen's own heat, setting the paste on ice or in the coldest corner of the pantry between turns.