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Fine Leaf Paste. Ten-Minute Paste
1 pound of cold butter. 1 pound of cold flour. 1/2 pint of ice-water-a coffecupful.
Cut the butter into pieces size of walnuts and put them in a vessel containing broken ice and water some time before using, to become very hard and cold. Sift the flour into a pan and lay aside a handful to dust with. Throw in the lumps of butter, mix them with the dry flour, pour in the ice water and shake altogether, merely getting the flour dampened and stuck to the lumps of butter, without kneading or pressing. Scrape out the contents of the pan on to the table well floured, press it up together and then roll it out with all the force necessary to break the lumps of butter, and spread all out to a thin sheet. Now loosen it from the table with the palette knife and roll it up like a roly-poly pudding, and count 1. Roll it out again to half an inch, fold over in three like ordinary paste and count 2, and so roll and fold in three till you have connted 6 foldings. But when half done it should have an interval of 5 or 10 minutes to stand in a cold place and lose its elasticity.
This is a rough puff — all the butter goes in at the start as cold lumps rather than being enclosed in a détrempe. Everything depends on keeping those lumps solid.
- The hinge: the butter must stay in piecesThe lift comes from lumps of butter flattening into sheets between layers of dough, not from a smooth emulsion. If the kitchen is warm or the mixing goes on too long, the butter smears, the layers merge and the paste bakes heavy. Ice-water-chilled walnut-sized cubes, then minimal handling, are the whole technique.
- WeightsEqual weights of butter and flour, 1 lb each — about 3 1/2 cups of flour. That is at the rich end of the range for a rough puff, some modern versions using rather less butter than flour, and it makes a very tender, greedy paste.
- "1/2 pint of ice-water — a coffeecupful"In US measure the two agree closely: a half pint is 8 fl oz, and a coffee cup in period American books was generally reckoned at roughly that. Read as an imperial half pint it would be 10 fl oz. Start with 3/4 cup and add only enough more to dampen the flour; the dough should look shaggy and underhydrated, not smooth.
- FlourPastry flour of the period was often softer than modern all-purpose, though milling varied. Plain all-purpose works; a blend of two parts all-purpose to one part cake flour will be closer to a soft pastry flour. There is no salt in the list — add about 1 1/2 teaspoons to the flour unless the filling is very salty.
- Palette knifeA thin flexible metal blade, used here as a bench scraper. Any wide offset spatula or dough scraper does the job of lifting the sheet off the table without tearing it.
- Counting the turnsThe first roll-up "like a roly-poly pudding" counts as fold 1; the remaining five are ordinary book folds in three. Six turns on a butter-heavy paste is plenty — more will begin to work the layers into a single mass.
- The rest is not optionalThe 5 to 10 minutes suggested halfway through is a minimum. Refrigerate 20 to 30 minutes at the halfway point and again before rolling out to use, both to relax the gluten and to re-firm the butter.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsPuff paste needs a hot oven to turn its water to steam before the butter melts out: 425F, dropping to 375–400F once risen and set. Bake on a heavy sheet, chilled straight from the refrigerator.
- YieldRoughly two and a half pounds of paste before trimmings — enough for two large double-crust tarts, several dozen small vol-au-vents, or several sheets of napoleon layers. It freezes well after the final fold.
"Leaf paste" is a direct English rendering of the French pâte feuilletée — paste in leaves, meaning layers — and the ten-minute name marks it as the quick or "rough" version, in which the butter is broken into the flour at the outset instead of being laminated in as a solid block over the course of an afternoon. Jessup Whitehead wrote for men working hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than for households, and the whole book is shaped by that: counted foldings, a bench and a palette knife assumed, a paste specified by the pound because it will be cut into dozens of shells before service. The insistence on broken ice in the butter is generally read against a period when a commercial kitchen's cold was, as a rule, an icebox and a cellar, and a pastry cook worked early in the morning against the heat of the ranges.