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Excellent Paste for Pastry
Equal quantities of butter and flour, well mixed in a little beer; add also a pinch of salt. Make this paste the day before you require it; it is good for little patties and tarts.
Chocolate Cream (No. 2) Melt four penny tablets of chocolate in hot milk until it is liquid and without lumps. Boil up a pint of milk with a stick of vanilla, a big lump of butter (size of a walnut) and ten lumps of sugar. When this boils, add the chocolate and keep stirring continually. Then take the yolks of three eggs and well beat them; it is better to have these beaten before, so as not to interfere with the stirring of your mixture. Add your three yolks and keep on stirring, always in the same way. Then pour the mixture into a mold that has been rinsed out in very cold water, and let it stand in a cool place till set.
Two recipes ran together on one page: a beer-enriched short paste and a stirred chocolate custard set in a mold. Both are written for a cook who already knows the technique, so the quantities need pinning down.
- Equal butter and flour means by weightEqual butter and flour probably means by weight -- try 8 oz butter to 8 oz flour and add beer a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres, perhaps 3 to 5 tablespoons. The recipe does not say what kind of beer; any pale beer will serve, and the tenderness often credited to beer's bubbles and mild acidity is cook's lore rather than established fact.
- The overnight rest is the pointA paste this rich is hard to handle warm. Make it a day ahead as the recipe directs and keep it cool -- refrigeration is a modern substitute for a cold larder, not part of the instruction -- then roll it cold and firm; the rest also lets the gluten relax so the shells hold their shape.
- Oven for the patties and tartsNo temperature is given. Bake small butter-heavy shells hot and fast, 400 to 425F, until set and pale gold; blind-bake tart cases with weights.
- "Four penny tablets of chocolate"A pre-1914 penny tablet of eating chocolate was roughly an ounce, so about 4 oz total — but the size genuinely varied by maker and this is an estimate, not a conversion. Use 4 oz of dark eating chocolate, not unsweetened baking chocolate, or the cream will be bitter against only ten lumps of sugar.
- Lumps and walnutsPeriod sugar lumps varied in size, but were broadly in the range of a modern cube, so ten lumps is very roughly 40 g, about 3 tablespoons. A lump of butter the size of a walnut is about 1 oz.
- VanillaA stick of vanilla is a whole bean. Split it, simmer it in the milk, and fish it out before the yolks go in; a teaspoon of extract stirred in at the end is the substitute.
- The hinge: the yolks must thicken off the boilAdd the beaten yolks with the pan off direct heat, then return it to low heat and stir until the custard coats a spoon and reads 175 to 180F. Boiling after the yolks go in will scramble them, and leaving them barely warmed gives a thin, undercooked cream.
- Setting without gelatinThis is a custard, not a jelly, so the set is soft. Rinsing the mold in cold water helps it turn out, but chill at least four hours and expect something between a pot de crème and a pudding; serving it in glasses avoids the problem entirely.
- YieldA pint of milk with three yolks makes about four to six small servings.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees, and its instructions read like dictation from cooks working from memory rather than from a professional manuscript — no oven temperatures, sugar counted in lumps, butter measured against a walnut. The beer in the pastry is the most Belgian thing on the page: in a country with a brewery in every town, small beer would plausibly have been a cheap and readily available liquid for doughs, and its bubbles and mild acid might be expected to give a tenderness bakers elsewhere sought from ice water or vinegar. The chocolate is equally of its place and moment, bought as ready-made penny tablets of eating chocolate rather than as cocoa or blocks of couverture, a reminder that Belgian chocolate was already an everyday grocery purchase before it became an export byword.