Rolls, Fluted
INGREDIENTS. - Puff-paste, the white of an egg, sifted sugar, jelly or preserve.
Make some good puff-paste (trimmings answer very well for little dishes of this sort) ; roll it out to the thickness of 1/4 inch, and with a round fluted paste-cutter stamp out as many round pieces as may be required; brush over the upper side with the white of an egg; roll up the pieces, pressing the paste lightly together where it joins; place the rolls on a baking-sheet, FRENCH ROLL, and bake for about 1 hour. A few minutes before they are done, brush them over with the white of an egg, strew over sifted sugar, put them back in the oven, and when the icing is firm and of a pale brown colour, they are done. Place a strip of jelly or preserve across each roll, dish them high on a napkin, and serve cold.
TIME. hour before being iced; 5 to 10 minutes after.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Roux, Brown. (A French Thickening for Gravies and Sauces.) - INGREDIENTS.- 6 oz. of butter, 9 oz. of flour. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Melt the butter in a stewpan over a slow fire, and dredge in, very gradually, the flour; stir it till of a light-brown colourto obtain this do it very slowly, otherwise the flour will burn and impart a bitter taste to the sauce it is mixed with. Pour it in a jar, and keep it for use; it will remain good some time.
TIME.-About 1/2 hour.
Two entries have run together here, as often happens in the alphabetical editions: a small puff-paste sweet and the brown roux that follows it in the R section. Both are still perfectly workable, but the printed times need reading with care.
- The baking time is a misprintThe instruction "bake for about 1 hour" and the TIME line reading "hour before being iced" have both lost their fractions in setting. Quarter-inch puff paste rolled into small spirals needs 12 to 18 minutes; an hour would reduce them to charcoal. Bake until well risen, dry and pale gold, then ice.
- Oven heatThe entry gives no oven heat at all. Puff paste is generally baked hot, in the region of 425F, so the water in the butter layers flashes to steam before the fat melts out; something nearer 375-400F for the final 5 to 10 minutes with the sugar on will keep the icing from scorching before it sets.
- "FRENCH ROLL" in the middle of the textThis appears to be a stray illustration caption that has fallen into the column rather than an ingredient or a step. Ignore it.
- TrimmingsBeeton's suggestion is sound practice: re-rolled puff scraps will not rise as evenly as virgin paste, so they are best used for exactly this kind of small twisted shape where irregularity does not show. Stack the scraps in layers rather than balling them up, or you lose the lamination entirely.
- White of egg twice overThe first brushing is glue, to make the rolled spiral hold; keep it off the cut edges, which need to stay free to puff. The second brushing plus sifted sugar is a meringue-ish glaze that sets crisp. Caster sugar works better than icing sugar here, which tends to dissolve and run.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies neither a quantity of paste nor a cutter size; as a rough guide, a 250 g block rolled to 1/4 inch and stamped with a 2 1/2-inch fluted cutter will give something like a dozen rolls. "Dish them high on a napkin" means piled up on a folded cloth on a serving plate, a common Victorian presentation for dry pastries. The jelly goes on only just before serving or it soaks in.
- The roux proportions6 oz butter to 9 oz flour is by weight, a stiff paste rather than the equal-weight roux most modern recipes use. The extra flour is deliberate: it makes a firm block you can cut spoonfuls from cold, which is the whole point of "pour it in a jar, and keep it for use."
- Browning slowly is the hingeBeeton is right that speed is the enemy. Over a low flame, 30 to 40 minutes of steady stirring takes it to light brown without the acrid note that scorched flour gives every sauce it touches. A heavy pan and patience; if it smells sharp rather than nutty, start again.
- Storing the roux"It will remain good some time" assumed a cool larder. Refrigerated in a sealed jar it keeps a month or more, and it freezes indefinitely. Note that browned flour has lost some thickening power, so a brown roux needs more of itself than a white one to reach the same consistency.
Fluted rolls belong to the large Victorian family of small puff-paste "dishes for little suppers" -- items designed to use up the trimmings from vol-au-vents and patties rather than to be made from scratch, which is why the entry begins by pointing you at the scrap bin. The brown roux beside it is a more consequential borrowing: the flour-and-butter thickening was codified in French professional kitchens and reached English domestic cookery through the same channel as bechamel and espagnole, and Beeton labels it plainly as "a French thickening". Keeping a jar of ready-browned roux in the larder may well have suited a household that expected to produce gravy daily and had no stock cubes or bottled sauce to fall back on, though how common the practice was is not documented. The two entries sit together for no reason beyond the alphabet: this edition arranged everything Beeton had written under headwords from A to Z, so pastry and sauce base share a page.