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Patty Shells
Follow the directions for making puff-paste. One half pound of flour will make about six patty shells.
Roll the paste to a thickness of one fourth inch; stamp out with a large round cutter and cut the centers from half of the rounds. Lay the rings thus made on the whole rounds, pressing them down so that they will stick together. In cold weather it may be necessary to wet the top of the large rounds near the edge to make sure that the rings will not slip. If deeper patty shells are wished two or three rings may be placed on top of the rounds instead of one.
Have the oven as hot as for baking white bread. The shells should rise in ten minutes and then take twenty minutes longer to bake through and brown. There will usually be a little soft dough left in the center. This should be carefully removed with a fork.
A method rather than an ingredient list: the recipe assumes you already have puff paste in hand and only tells you how to build and bake the cases. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- Oven heat"As hot as for baking white bread" points to a hot oven, roughly 400-450F. Puff paste needs that initial blast to turn its water to steam and drive the layers apart; a moderate oven melts the butter out and gives you a flat, greasy disc.
- YieldHalf a pound of flour is about two cups, and with the butter and water it makes something close to a pound of finished paste — the six shells of ordinary size the recipe promises, and fewer than six if you stack two or three rings for depth.
- Thickness and cuttersA quarter inch is worth measuring; rolled thinner the rings collapse, thicker and the base is slow to bake through. The recipe gives no cutter sizes; about 3 inches for the outer round with a smaller cutter for the center is a usual modern choice.
- Water, not egg, on the joinThe instruction to wet the edge in cold weather is because chilled butter-laden paste will not adhere to itself. Use water only and keep it off the cut sides — egg or excess water on the exposed edges glues the layers shut and the shell will not rise.
- Chill before bakingNot stated in the recipe. Resting the assembled shells in the refrigerator 20-30 minutes, so the butter is firm when they meet the oven, is modern practice and helps.
- TimingTen minutes to rise, twenty more to color, so about 30 minutes total. Do not open the oven during the first ten minutes; the escaping steam is what is doing the lifting.
- The soft centerRemoving the underbaked dough with a fork is right, but do it while the shells are still hot, then return the hollowed cases to the oven for 3-5 minutes to dry the interior. Otherwise the filling turns the base to paste.
- Why it sits under VegetablesThese are containers, not a dish. Fill them at the last possible moment with creamed peas, mushrooms, asparagus tips or salsify; a filled shell begins to soften within minutes.
Patty shells are the American name for the French vol-au-vent and its smaller cousin the bouchée — a ring of puff paste baked on a round base to make an edible cup, generally credited in kitchen tradition to the early nineteenth-century Paris pastry trade and to Carême's circle, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. Building them from stamped rounds and rings, as here, appears to have been a common method in the American cooking schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a hostess was often said to be expected to serve creamed vegetables or sweetbreads in individual cases rather than from a dish. That this entry falls under Vegetables in a loose-leaf book says a good deal about the period's table: the shell was a way to promote peas or mushrooms to the standing of a course.