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Crust, Another good Short
INGREDIENTS.-To every lb. of flour allow 8 oz. of butter, the yolks of 2 eggs, 2 oz. of sifted sugar, about 1/4 pint of milk. Aver- AGE COST, 8d. per lb.
Rub the butter into the flour, add the sugar, and mix the whole as lightly as possible to a smooth paste, with the yolks of the eggs well beaten, and the milk. The proportion of the latter ingredient must be judged of by the size of the eggs; if these are large so much will not be required, and more if the eggs are smaller.
Cucumber Sandwiches.
INGREDIENTS. - Very thin bread-andbutter, cucumber, oil, vinegar, pepper. Stamp from the slices of bread with a tin cutter little rounds, the size of the cucumber slices. Lay the latter for a few minutes in a mixture of oil, vinegar and pepper; then put them between the rounds of bread-and-butter.
SEASONABLE in summer.
A rich sweetened short crust of the type Mrs Beeton used for fruit tarts and small pastries, followed by a summer sandwich. Both are simple; the pastry lives or dies on how little you handle it.
- Weights in modern terms1 lb flour is about 450 g or 3 1/2 cups; 8 oz butter is 225 g or two US sticks; 2 oz sifted sugar is about 55 g or 1/4 cup. This makes a generous batch, enough for two 9-inch tarts or a double-crust pie.
- The quarter pint of milkAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. The recipe treats it as approximate, to be judged by the size of the eggs: less with large eggs, more with small ones. Add it by spoonfuls, since the yolks carry a good deal of liquid already.
- Keep everything cold"Rub the butter into the flour" means working cold butter to the size of small peas with fingertips or a pastry blender. Warm hands and overworking give a tough, greasy crust rather than a short one.
- Rest before rollingThe original does not say so, but wrap the paste and chill it 30 minutes before rolling. It relaxes the gluten and stops the tart shrinking down the sides of the tin.
- Baking temperatureNo oven is specified. Sweetened short crust bakes at 375-400F; blind-bake a shell 15 minutes with weights, then 5-10 minutes uncovered. The sugar means it colours faster than a plain crust, so watch the edges.
- What to do with the whitesTwo yolks leave two whites. Use them for meringue, an egg-white glaze for a top crust, or a cake that calls for whites alone.
- Cucumber sandwichesDress the cucumber slices briefly, then drain them thoroughly on a cloth before assembling. Oil and vinegar left clinging will soak through thin bread within minutes. Cut the bread rounds and butter them to the edge; the butter is the waterproofing.
Short crust is 'short' in the old culinary sense of crumbly; the fat later took the name 'shortening' from that sense, fat coating the flour particles so they cannot form long gluten strands. The enriched version here, with yolks and sugar, is closer to what French kitchens call pate sucree and was better suited to sweet tarts than to meat pies, where a plainer paste or a hot-water crust did the work. The cucumber sandwich that follows belongs to the same book's world of afternoon tea, a meal that took shape in Britain over the middle of the nineteenth century; cucumbers out of the open-ground season meant a heated glasshouse or a hotbed.