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Patty Cases
Make recipe for Puff Paste. It will be sufficient for 6 large cases, or 10 small ones. To shape the paste for patty roll 1/4 inch thick and stamp out with 2 1/4 inch cutter twice as many pieces as you wish shells. Cut centers from one half of them, leaving rim about 1/2 inch wide. Lay these rings on the whole rounds, pressing them down that they may stick together. In very cold weather it may be necessary to wet the top of the large rounds near the edge to make sure that the rings do not slip. To make very deep shells, roll the paste about 1/8 inch thick and lay on two rings or even three; but they are troublesome to make as they are apt to slip to one side. The oven should be as hot as for baking white bread. Patty shells should rise in ten minutes and then take about 20 minutes longer to bake through and brown. There will usually be in the center a little soft dough that should be picked out with a fork, taking great care not to break through the side or bottom crust.
A construction method rather than a formula: the recipe assumes you already have puff paste made and chilled. Everything depends on keeping the layers cold and cutting them cleanly.
- Oven heat"As hot as for baking white bread" is the only guide given; no degrees appear anywhere in the recipe. In practice that suggests a hot oven, in the region of 400-425F. Puff paste needs strong heat so the moisture in the dough and butter turns to steam; a moderate oven tends to melt the butter out and give a flat, greasy shell. Bake with the oven fully preheated.
- TimingThe recipe's ten minutes to rise and about twenty minutes more to bake through is plausible for shells cut with a 2 1/4-inch cutter in a hot oven. If they are browning too fast before the interior sets, lower the heat for the last part of the bake rather than pulling them early.
- The cutterA 2 1/4-inch round cutter, with the centre removed by a smaller cutter to leave a 1/2-inch rim. Press straight down and lift; twisting the cutter seals the cut edges together and the shell will rise crooked or not at all.
- Keeping the rings in placeThe wetting trick works, but use water only, and only a film of it along the rim. Better still, chill the assembled shells 20-30 minutes before baking so the paste is firm when it hits the oven.
- Ready-made pastryAll-butter frozen puff pastry is a fair substitute. Thaw in the refrigerator, roll to the 1/4 inch specified, and work quickly; commercial pastry softens faster than a hand-laminated paste.
- Hollowing the shellsThe recipe has you pick the little soft centre out with a fork, taking care not to break through the side or bottom crust. Doing this while the shells are still hot, and returning them briefly to a turned-off oven to dry the interior, are additions of our own; a damp inner wall will go soggy as soon as the filling goes in.
- Yield and useOne batch of puff paste gives 6 large or 10 small cases. Fill them at the last moment with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or mushrooms in a thick white sauce; a thin filling will collapse the walls within minutes.
Patty cases are a household relative of the French vol-au-vent, though the classic vol-au-vent is a single large case and the individual size is properly a bouchée. Cases of this kind were a fixture of ambitious American entertaining across the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They solved a hostess's problem neatly: a rich creamed filling that would look shapeless in a dish becomes an individual portion with a crisp edge, and the shells can be baked ahead and filled at the table. The technique described here, stacking cut rings on a solid base rather than cutting a single thick block partway through, was one of the methods household manuals favoured, presumably because it is easier to manage without a pastry chef's bench or a cool marble slab. The instruction to gauge the oven by comparison with white bread rather than by degrees is a reminder that reliable oven thermometers were not yet universal in domestic kitchens.