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Sweet Tart Paste
1 pound of flour. 6 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of powdered sugar. 2 eggs. 1/2 cupful of water.
Rub the butter thoroughly into the flour dry. Allow a little salt if not enough in the butter. Break the eggs in the middle, add the sugar and water, mix up and knead smooth.
A working pastry-shop sweet paste, written in weights for a cook making several tarts at once. Everything hinges on how much water goes in and how much you work it afterwards.
- The hinge: hold back waterHalf a cupful is the outside figure for a pound of flour, and modern flour is often thirstier or less so than the writer's. Add two-thirds of it, mix, and only add the rest if the dough will not come together in a mass.
- "Knead smooth" means brieflyThis is not bread. Work it just until there are no dry patches and the surface is even, then stop; a sweet paste kneaded past that point bakes hard and shrinks off the sides of the tin.
- Weights into cups1 lb flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled, 6 oz butter is 1 1/2 sticks, 2 oz powdered sugar is roughly 1/2 cup of confectioners' sugar.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here; superfine (caster) sugar is the closer match.
- Rubbing in dryThe butter is rubbed into the flour before any liquid, which is what keeps the paste short. Use cool, firm butter and work to the texture of coarse meal, not a paste.
- SaltThe instruction to allow salt "if not enough in the butter" assumes salted butter of variable strength. With unsalted butter, use about 1 teaspoon of fine salt for the pound of flour.
- Rest before rollingThe original says nothing about it, but wrap and chill the dough at least 30 minutes. It rolls thinner, tears less and holds its shape in the oven.
- BakingThe original gives no baking instruction of any kind. If you blind-bake shells from it, line, dock and weight the pastry and bake in a moderately hot oven (around 375-400F) until the edges colour, then remove the weights to dry out the base.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of paste, enough for two 9-inch tart shells with trimmings, or a large number of small tartlets. It freezes well.
Sweet paste of this kind is the Anglo-American cousin of French pâte sucrée: the same short flour-and-butter dough, sweetened just enough to belong under fruit or custard rather than under meat. The method is straightforward: the butter is rubbed into the flour, the eggs broken into the middle, and the sugar and water added and mixed in.