Puff Paste
2 cups flour. 1 cup butter. 1/2 cup ice water. 1 teaspoon salt. Wash butter well. Take out one tablespoon, put the rest in refrigerator. Sift salt with flour, put in tablespoon butter. With the tips of fingers mix into stiff dough with ice water. Knead until smooth. Roll out into oblong pieces. Put the rest of butter in the center, fold sides and ends over the butter. Let stand ten minutes, roll again with light quick strokes. Fold the ends to center and then fold again. Turn and roll as before, always letting it stand between rolling.
After rolling several times cut into shape, chill, and bake in hot oven. This can be cut in rounds one-fourth inch thick, put two rounds together, cut out center of top with smaller cutter. Use this for top after the cases are filled with creamed meats or vegetables.
CREAM PASTRY FOR ROLLS, DUMPLINGS AND SOME FRUIT PIES. 1 pint flour. 1 spoon salt. 2 spoons powder. 1 tablespoon sugar. 1/2 cup butter and fat mixed. Sweet milk enough to make soft dough.
A classic laminated puff paste with a second, much simpler cream pastry tacked on at the end. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what rough puff looks like, so the critical details are the ones left unsaid.
- Wash the butterWorking the butter under cold water in a bowl removes buttermilk and excess salt, which is what made old butter weep and burn in the oven. Modern unsalted butter needs no washing; buy a good European-style butter with higher fat and skip the step entirely.
- Temperature is the whole recipeThe butter block and the dough must stay firm and at the same consistency. If butter breaks through the dough during rolling, stop and chill for 20-30 minutes before continuing; leaked butter means fused layers and no rise.
- "Let stand ten minutes"Rest the paste between every turn, both to relax the gluten and to re-firm the butter. Ten minutes may not be enough if the kitchen or the dough is warm.
- How many turnsThe recipe never says. Classic practice is usually six turns: fold, rotate 90 degrees, roll, repeat. The recipe's mix of book folds and letter folds is fine, but keep count or the layers go uneven.
- "Hot oven"425-450F. Puff paste needs a hard initial blast so the water in the butter turns to steam and lifts the layers before the fat melts out. A moderate oven will produce a greasy, flat biscuit.
- The vol-au-vent casesCut all rounds with a floured, sharp cutter pressed straight down; twisting seals the edges and the case will not rise. The ring goes on top of a plain round, and the small cut-out disc is baked alongside as the lid.
- Cream pastry measuresA pint of flour is 2 cups. "2 spoons powder" is baking powder, and given the flour quantity read the unqualified spoons as teaspoons for salt and powder alike; the recipe writes "tablespoon" where it means one, and a tablespoon of baking powder in 2 cups of flour would be excessive. The milk is left to judgement -- add it gradually until the dough is soft.
- YieldThe puff paste works out to something over a pound of dough, enough for roughly a dozen 3-inch cases. It freezes well after the final turn; thaw overnight in the refrigerator before cutting.
Puff paste under "Vegetables" makes sense once you see the last line: the cases are meant to be filled with creamed meats or vegetables, the patty shell or vol-au-vent that carried creamed peas, mushrooms, sweetbreads or chicken through American home entertaining. Mrs. Wilson's instruction to wash the butter is a step that survives in nineteenth-century pastry writing long after commercial creameries made it unnecessary. The technique of laminating dough around a block of butter is generally traced to French patisserie, where the same paste is called pate feuilletee, and English and American cookbooks had been printing versions of it for well over a century by the time this book appeared. The second recipe, thrown in without ceremony, is the everyday alternative: a chemically leavened cream pastry for cooks who had neither the time nor the cold kitchen that real puff paste demands.