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Puff-paste Rings, or Puits d'Amour
INGREDIENTS. - Puff-paste (see PASTE), the white of an egg, sifted loaf sugar.
Make some good puff-paste by recipe; roll it out to the thickness of about 1/4 inch, and, with a round fluted paste-cutter, stamp out as many pieces as may be required; then work the paste up again, with a smaller cutter, stamp out sufficient pieces to correspond with the larger ones.
Again stamp out the centre of these smaller rings; brush over the others with the white of an egg, place a small ring on the top of every large circular piece of paste, egg over the tops, and bake from 15 to 20 minutes. Sift over sugar, put them back in the oven to colour them; then fill the rings with preserve of any bright colour. Dish them high on a napkin, and serve. So many pretty dishes of pastry may be made by stamping puff-paste out with fancy cutters, and filling the pieces, when baked, with jelly or preserve, that our space will not allow us to give a separate recipe for each of them; but as they are all made from one paste, and only the shape and garnishing varied, perhaps it is not necessary, and by exercising a little ingenuity, variety may always be obtained. Half-moons, leaves, diamonds, stars, shamrocks, rings, &c., are the most appropriate shapes for fancy pastry.
TIME.-15 to 25 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Pumpkin Pie. (American Recipe.) -INGREDIENTS for large pie.-Pumpkin, 6 eggs, 3 pints of milk, ½ lb. of loaf sugar, flavouring of mace and nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Pare the pumpkin, take out the seeds, and stew till soft, press it through a sieve, and to a quart of the pulp allow the ingredients named. Mix first with it the sugar, then the milk, then the yolks and whites of the eggs, beaten separately, and beat all together. Line a pie-dish with puff-paste, pour in the mixture, and bake in a quick oven.
TIME. hour to bake the pie.
SEASONABLE in summer.
A vol-au-vent in miniature: two discs of puff paste baked into a shallow-walled ring, glazed with sugar, then filled with jam. The technique is all in the cutting and the heat.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. Puff paste needs a hot oven to lift; somewhere around 425F (220C) suits the 15 to 20 minutes given. A slack oven melts the butter out before the layers set, and the rings will slump rather than rise.
- Cut cleanlyPress the fluted cutter straight down and lift straight up. Twisting seals the cut edge and the pastry rises lopsided or not at all. Dipping the cutter in flour helps.
- Re-rolled trimmingsThe recipe has you work the scraps up again for the top rings, which is fine here, but stack the offcuts rather than kneading them into a ball, or the layering is lost and the rings will be tough.
- Sifted loaf sugarLoaf sugar was cut from a cone and sifted to a fine powder; use caster or superfine sugar. The brief return to the oven melts it to a glaze, so watch it closely -- a minute or two under a hot top is enough before it scorches.
- Egg white, not whole eggWhite of egg alone is used as the glue between the two pieces and as the wash. It sets clear and lets the sugar catch colour; a whole-egg wash would brown too fast under the second sugaring.
- Fill after bakingThe preserve goes into the cooled rings, not before baking. Jam in the oven boils over and dissolves the pastry walls. Warm, sieved jam poured in and left to set gives the bright surface the recipe is after.
- Dishing high on a napkinA Victorian presentation: a folded linen napkin on the serving dish, pastries piled in a pyramid. It kept fried and baked goods from sweating on cold porcelain. A wire rack and a flat platter do the same job now.
- YieldThe recipe names no quantity of paste or size of cutter. As a rough guide, about 450g of puff paste rolled to 1/4 inch should give somewhere near a dozen rings from a 2 1/2 inch cutter. Best eaten the day they are made -- filled pastry goes soft overnight.
Puits d'amour -- "wells of love" -- is a French pastry generally traced to Paris kitchens of the early eighteenth century, and often credited to Vincent La Chapelle, who published a version in the 1730s. The original was a pastry case filled with redcurrant jelly or, later, with a caramelised custard; by Mrs Beeton's day the English kitchen had reduced it to the simplest form, two stamped rounds of puff paste and a spoonful of bright preserve. What the entry really documents is the Victorian pastry-cutter set: the closing remarks, dismissing separate recipes for half-moons, leaves, diamonds, stars and shamrocks, assume a household with a boxed range of tinned cutters and a cook expected to improvise fancy dishes from one basic paste. Mass-produced cutters had made ornamental pastry cheap, and the confectioner's repertoire moved into the ordinary middle-class kitchen.