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Paste Puff, Old Recipe
1 pound of flour 1 pound of butter A teaspoon of baking powder Take three ounces of flour from the pound, to use for working up the paste, and put the remainder in a bowl, mixing it well with the baking-powder. Divide the butter into four portions, and rub one into the flour; then mix with as much water as will make a perfectly smooth paste. Now roll out the paste to the thickness of a shilling, and break up the butter into bits the size of a hazel-nut, placing them over the paste. Dredge lightly with some of the flour taken out for working. Be careful to leave a margin of an inch to allow for the butter spreading in rolling. Fold the paste into four, and roll out again to the thickness of a shilling. Repeat these directions exactly, in working in the third and fourth parts of the butter. When all the butter has been used fold the paste into three, and once again lengthwise. Lay it in a deep dish, and cover closely, letting it stand in a cool place for at least twelve hours. This paste will keep two or three days without baking unless the weather is very hot. Be very careful in making up the paste into tartlets, tarts, etc., to keep it the way of the grain in rolling out or as flakes lie. The cuttings if placed flat, one on top of the other, and rolled out, will then be just as light and flaky as when rolled out at first. Some cooks spoil quite a quarter of the paste in making tartlets, etc., by not observing this rule, for if the cuttings are gathered up carelessly in the hand, and made into a ball, and then rolled out, all the work of the cook is spoiled, for paste treated so will be very little better than ordinary short-paste.
This is full puff paste by the old English method — equal weights of butter and flour, worked in four stages rather than as a single butter block. The instructions are complete but assume a cook who already knows what finished paste should feel like.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe butter must stay in distinct layers and never smear into the flour. Work on the coolest surface you have, chill the paste between turns if the butter softens, and stop the moment it begins to look greasy rather than marbled.
- "Thickness of a shilling"A shilling was roughly 1/16 inch, i.e. about 1.5-2 mm. That is thinner than many modern puff-pastry instructions.
- "Size of a hazel-nut"Roughly 1/2 inch lumps, about the size of a large marble. Distribute them evenly over the sheet rather than in clumps, or the paste will rise unevenly.
- The baking powderA teaspoon in a pound of flour is a Victorian belt-and-braces measure; properly laminated paste rises on steam alone. It does no harm, but leaving it out will not hurt the result.
- QuantitiesA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; a pound of butter is four American sticks. The three ounces reserved for dusting is roughly 2/3 cup — use far less than that in practice and discard the rest, since worked-in dredging flour toughens the paste.
- Twelve hours' restAn overnight rest in the refrigerator, not merely a cool larder. It relaxes the gluten so the paste does not shrink and twist in the oven. The claim that it keeps two or three days holds under refrigeration; it also freezes well.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsPuff paste wants a hot oven: 425F, dropping to 375-400F once the rise has set. A cool oven melts the butter out before the layers can lift.
- YieldRather more than two pounds of paste once the water is counted, enough for several tart shells or a few dozen small tartlets.
- The point about cuttingsThis is the most useful paragraph on the page. Stack trimmings flat, in the same orientation, and re-roll; balling them up destroys the layers and gives you shortcrust instead.
Puff paste of this kind is often linked to French pâte feuilletée, though the origins of laminated pastry are contested, and the four-stage method — adding a quarter of the butter at each of four turns, rather than enclosing one large slab — appears in nineteenth-century British cookery books alongside the single butter block. The teaspoon of baking powder is the giveaway that this is a late version of an "old recipe": chemical raising agents were cheap and ubiquitous by the 1890s. If the page comes, as it appears to, from a section called "Bread, Etc." of a meatless cookery book, its place there is straightforward — a vegetarian household still wanted tarts, tartlets and vegetable pasties, and a good puff paste was the foundation of all of them. The scolding tone of the closing lines about wasted cuttings belongs to a period when a pound of butter was a serious expense and spoiling a quarter of the paste was a real loss.