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Royal Patty Shells
2 cups flour 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons shortening ice water Sift flour, baking powder and salt together; add shortening and rub in very lightly with tips of fingers; add very slowly enough cold water to make stiff dough. Roll out thin; cut into circles and form on the outside of patty or muffin tins. Bake in hot oven, open side open down, until light brown; remove carefully from tins and return shells to oven and bake 5 minutes, open side up.
A baking-powder pastry shaped over the outside of muffin cups rather than inside them — a shortcut alternative to puff paste for creamed fillings and croquette mixtures. A few details need translating.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; read "hot oven" as roughly 400-450F. These shells are thin and want to set fast.
- ShorteningIn a Royal book of this era shortening means lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat such as Crisco. Chilled butter or modern shortening both work; keep the fat cold and the water ice cold so it stays in flakes.
- The hinge: shape over the outsideThe dough circles go on the outsides of inverted muffin or patty tins, cup-side down on the oven rack or a sheet. Baked this way they cannot collapse inward, and you get a self-supporting cup rather than a lined hollow.
- How thin, how wideRoll thin, about 1/8 inch, and cut circles wide enough to reach the rim of the inverted cup without stretching. Press gently; stretched dough shrinks back as it bakes.
- Two-stage bakeFirst bake inverted until light brown; the recipe gives no time, but expect somewhere around 10-15 minutes for standard muffin cups. Let the shells cool a minute before lifting them off -- they are fragile hot -- then return them right side up for the final 5 minutes to dry the inside so a wet filling does not soak through.
- Water quantityThe recipe gives none. Expect roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup of ice water for 2 cups of flour; add it a tablespoon at a time and stop when the dough just holds together, since "stiff dough" here means firm, not dry and cracking.
- Yield and fillingTwo cups of flour should give something like eight to twelve standard shells, depending on how wide you cut them. Fill only just before serving, with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms or a croquette mixture; the crust softens quickly once wet.
Patty shells belong to the long line of small edible cases that includes the French vol-au-vent, a nineteenth-century form; the older English "pattie" is usually traced to pâté — a pastry container for a savoury filling. Classically the shell was puff paste, laminated by hand over hours, which is likely why a baking-powder company put this version in print: Royal's cookbooks seem to have existed to show that its powder could stand in for the labour and skill of older methods, and the word "Royal" in the title of a plain biscuit-dough shell reads as advertising as much as description. The trick of moulding dough over inverted tins appears in American cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, by which time pressed-tin muffin and gem pans had become cheap household equipment. Creamed fillings served in individual cases were a fixture of ladies' luncheons and club suppers of the period.