Tarts
Roll Puff Paste a little less than one fourth inch in thickness. Cut in rounds, squares, or diamonds; put on rim, wetting edges. Chill and bake.
Vol-au-vent No. 2 Cover the outside of a charlotte russe mold with Puff Paste, cut one fourth inch thick. Prick surface of paste, chill, and bake. Cut a cover for vol-au-vent to fit mold; prick, chill, and bake. Remove vol-au-vent from mold immediately after baking.
This is a shell recipe, not a filled dessert: two ways to build a puff-paste case that gets filled after baking. Everything depends on keeping the paste cold and giving it a hot enough oven to lift.
- The hinge: heat and coldPuff paste rises because water trapped between butter layers turns to steam faster than the layers can slump. The book gives no temperature; modern practice for puff paste is a hot oven, roughly 425-450F. Chill the cut shapes until firm before they go in — 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator, or 10 in the freezer. A warm oven or warm paste gives you a flat, greasy biscuit.
- "Put on rim"Cut a second piece the same shape, cut out its centre to leave a band about half an inch wide, brush the edge of the base with water, and lay the band on top. That ring rises into the wall of the tart while the centre stays low. Cut edges should be sliced cleanly straight down; dragging a dull cutter seals the layers and stops the lift.
- PrickingThe recipe calls for pricking only in Vol-au-vent No. 2: the shell on the mold and the cover cut to fit it. Do not prick the rim band. The holes let steam escape where you want the paste flat and keep the shell from ballooning off the mold.
- The charlotte russe moldA plain round tin with straight, slightly flaring sides, of about a quart or so in capacity. Any similar metal mold or ovenproof bowl of that size works. The paste goes on the outside, inverted on a sheet, so the finished shell is a hollow case in the shape of the mold.
- Removing from the moldLift the shell off while it is still hot, as directed. Cooling paste contracts onto the metal and will crack or stick. Slide a thin knife under the rim and ease it up in one movement.
- Modern puff pasteLowney's expects paste made in the house. All-butter frozen puff pastry behaves the same way, though ready-rolled sheets come thinner than the just-under-a-quarter-inch specified here; yield depends on the size of the sheet and on the fact that each rimmed tart needs two pieces of paste.
- FillingFill only after baking and only when cool, or the paste goes soft — pastry cream, sweetened whipped cream, poached fruit, or in the savoury version a creamed ragout. Unfilled shells keep a day in a tin and crisp again in a 350F oven for five minutes.
Vol-au-vent — literally "flight in the wind" — is a French pastry name generally traced to the early nineteenth-century Parisian kitchen and to Carême's circle, the phrase describing how little the baked case weighs for its size. By 1900 it had passed thoroughly into American domestic cookery, and books of this period routinely gave both the small individual tart and the large single case as exercises in the same puff paste. Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a chocolate manufacturer's cookbook, is unusual in that its dessert chapter runs well past chocolate into the whole standard repertoire of the New England cooking-school tradition; the terse, assume-nothing-but-competence style here is characteristic of that school, where puff paste was taught as a technique and the fillings were left to the cook.