Tart Paste
1 pound of flour. 6 ounces of butter. 2 ounces of powdered sugar. 2 eggs. Little salt. 1/2 cupful of water.
Rub the butter into the flour, add the eggs, sugar and salt with the water, mix and knead it smooth.
A plain sweet short paste of the kind American bakeshops kept on hand for open fruit tarts and lined flan rings. The proportions are lean by modern standards, and the handling instruction at the end is the part to be careful with.
- Knead, but only justThe recipe says "mix and knead it smooth," which is best read as brief working until the dough comes together evenly rather than a bread kneading. Overworking develops gluten and gives a tough, shrinking shell; stop as soon as there are no dry patches.
- Weights and volumesA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups scooped and levelled, and 6 ounces of butter is 1 1/2 sticks. The half cupful of water is a starting point, not a fixed amount; hold some back and add it only if the dough will not gather.
- Fat ratioAt 6 ounces of butter to a pound of flour this is a lean paste, closer to a lining dough than to a rich pâte sucrée. It rolls thin and holds a fluted edge well, but it will not be meltingly short.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar usually meant granulated sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Either works here; superfine dissolves most cleanly into the eggs and water.
- Rest before rollingThe original says nothing about resting, but the dough will roll better and shrink less after 30 minutes wrapped in the refrigerator, particularly in a warm modern kitchen.
- BakingNo oven is given. For a blind-baked tart shell, 375-400F until the edges are pale gold, with weights in the shell for the first two-thirds of the time.
- YieldA pound of flour makes enough for two to three 9-inch tart shells, or one shell with a lattice and trimmings. The dough freezes well in flattened discs.
American pastry manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often said to have been written for the trade rather than the home, and they read that way: a bare list of weights, a line of method, and an assumption that the reader already knows what a tart looks like. Paste recipes came in graded families -- puff paste, pie paste, tart paste, short paste -- distinguished mainly by fat ratio and by whether the fat was rubbed in or laminated. Tart paste seems to have sat somewhere in the middle: sweetened and enriched with egg so it could stand on its own as an edible container, but lean enough to roll thin and line a ring without slumping. The word tart itself comes into English from Old French tarte, and by this period it had settled in American usage on an open, shallow, usually fruit-filled pastry as distinct from a covered pie.