Puff Paste
1 pint of water (2 coffeecupfuls.) Flour-all the water will take up. Butter-from 1 1/2 to 2 pounds.
Mix the flour and water to soft dough. Roll it out about an inch thick. Take half the butter and drop it in lumps the size of eggs upon the sheet of dough, the width of two fingers between each lump. Sift a little flour over, press the butter into the dough slightly, then fold the dough over in three. Roll out to the same thickness as before, distribute the remaining half of the butter over it, dredge, and fold over in three again, and count that one fold--the former folding with only half the butter in counts nothing, or "half a turn." Always keep the dough rolled out to square shape and turn the broad side towards you after folding. Roll and fold till you have counted 6 times. Use plenty of flour under and over until the last rolling when the surplus should be swept off. It is then ready for use.
After a few trials neither butter nor flour need be weighed--the rule of butter size of an egg two fingers apart is all that is wanted, and the amount to be made can be governed by the cups or dippers of water used.
A working pastry cook's puff paste, written for someone who will make it daily and eventually stop weighing anything. The proportions are sound; the omissions are temperature and rest, both of which a nineteenth-century bakeshop took for granted.
- The hinge: cold and restedThe recipe never mentions chilling or resting at all. Refrigerate the paste 20-30 minutes after every second turn, and stop at once if butter begins to smear or break through rather than staying in distinct layers.
- How much flour"All the water will take up" is deliberately left to the cook's hand. For 1 pint (2 cups) of water expect somewhere in the region of 5 to 6 cups of flour, worked to a soft, just-cohesive dough. Aim for slack rather than stiff; a tight dough will fight the butter.
- Butter quantity1 1/2 to 2 lb of butter to that flour is a rich paste by any standard: at least as much butter as flour at the low end of the range, and well beyond it at the high. Start at the low end; the 2 lb version is for a cook with cold hands and a cold bench.
- Counting the turnsThe first folding, with only half the butter, counts as nothing. Six counted folds after that means seven letter folds in total, more than modern practice, which typically stops at six. The extra turns are why the paste needs frequent rest.
- Butter in lumps, not a blockDropping egg-sized lumps two fingers apart is an alternative to the single enclosed butter block most books now teach; both approaches are long-established. It works, and it is forgiving of butter that is slightly too firm, but the lumps must be pressed into the dough before folding or you will get holes and leakage.
- Sweeping off the flourThe instruction to sweep off the surplus flour before the last rolling matters more than it sounds. Dry flour trapped between layers absorbs no fat, stays raw, and shows as grey streaks and a chalky bite.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. Puff paste wants a quick oven, 425-450F, to turn the water in the butter to steam before the layers set. A moderate oven simply melts the butter out and the paste sits flat.
- YieldThis is a bakeshop batch: a pint of water plus the flour it takes up, with 1 1/2 to 2 lb of butter worked in, comes to something on the order of 4 lb of paste. Halve or quarter it for home use, which the closing note about governing the amount by cups of water invites you to do.
Puff paste, pâte feuilletée, was the test piece of the nineteenth-century professional pastry cook, and this is one of the books that treat it as a skill to be drilled rather than a recipe to be followed. The lump-of-butter method here, egg-sized pieces scattered over the dough instead of a single slab enclosed within it, is sometimes said to be the older of the two approaches, though the point is not settled. What dates this page most clearly is its final paragraph: measure by cups of water, judge the butter by eye at an egg apiece two fingers apart, and scale by dippers. That is how a working bakehouse thought, before domestic science and standardized measuring cups pushed American cookbooks toward level spoonfuls and exact volume measures.