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French Puff Paste or Feuilletage
It is requisite to have the butter very firm and free from water, and those who wish to have very superior pastry will use the very finest flour. Weigh your butter and flour in equal proportions, cut the butter into thin slices, take a little flour and roll it with a slice of butter into flakes, proceed thus until all the butter and flour are rolled together; gather the flakes into a heap, and sprinkle them with water, about a gill and a half is required for a pound of paste. Make into a smooth paste with the hand, and then roll it out to the thickness of half an inch. If a pound of paste, divide it into four parts, flour the board and roll out each part as thin as a wafer, fold over four or five times, and use as required. Bake as soon as possible. Then try this, and hold fast that which you succeed with the best.
A rough-puff method rather than the classic book-fold with a butter block: the fat is flaked into the flour first, then the dough is turned. It works, but it depends entirely on temperature.
- Cold is the hingeButter "very firm and free from water" means well chilled, and chilling the dough between turns helps in a warm kitchen, though the recipe itself says to bake as soon as possible. If the butter softens into the flour rather than staying in flakes, there is nothing to make steam pockets and the pastry bakes flat and short.
- A gill and a halfA gill is half a cup, so this is about 3/4 cup of ice water. Add it in stages -- flour absorbency varies, and the dough should just come together, not feel wet.
- "Equal proportions"Equal weights of butter and flour is the full-fat classical ratio, richer than many modern rough-puff recipes, which commonly use less butter than flour. Expect a very tender, very fragile paste that leaks butter if the oven is not hot enough.
- Butter, not modern spreadsUse unsalted butter of at least 82% fat if you can find it. European-style butter has less water than standard American butter, which matters here because the recipe specifically warns against water in the fat.
- Folding"Fold over four or five times" most likely describes folding the thin rolled sheet on itself rather than four or five separate turns; either way, roll in one direction, keep the edges square, and brush off loose flour before folding.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven instruction; for modern baking, 400-425F suits puff paste. High heat flashes the water in the butter to steam before the layers can collapse. A slow oven melts the butter out and the layers fuse.
- "As thin as a wafer"For the final roll this means very thin indeed, thinner than the eighth-inch usual for modern puff. Cut with a sharp knife or a floured cutter pressed straight down -- dragging or twisting seals the edges and stops the lift.
Feuilletage is the French name for laminated pastry, from feuille, a leaf -- the dough is meant to bake into countable sheets. Its invention is traditionally credited to the painter Claude Gell idge ée, called Claude Lorrain, who is said to have trained as a pastry cook, though the story is folklore rather than anything documented; layered butter-and-flour doughs are much older and appear across medieval Europe. What is notable here is the method: instead of the classical détrempe enclosing a single block of butter, the fat is sliced and rolled into flakes first. The closing line -- try this, and hold fast that which you succeed with the best -- leaves the choice to the baker, who is expected to test a method against their own flour, their own butter and their own oven rather than follow it blindly.