Galattes
Roll puff or plain paste one-eighth inch thick. Shape with an oblong cutter three and one-half inches long by one and three-fourths inches wide. Brush over with white of egg and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Bake in a hot oven. A lady-finger cutter may be used with satisfaction, but is more more difficult to procure.
A two-ingredient trimming for leftover pastry, closer to a cookie than a pie. The only real variables are the thickness of the paste and the heat of the oven.
- "Hot oven"No temperature is given; the term is usually read as somewhere around 400-450F. At lower heat the layers of puff paste will not lift and the strips dry out rather than crisping. Watch from about 8 minutes; thin puff scraps can go from pale to scorched in under a minute.
- Puff or plain paste"Plain paste" is ordinary short pie crust, the same dough you would line a pie plate with. Store-bought all-butter puff pastry works directly; roll it out to the specified 1/8 inch.
- The cutterAn oblong cutter 3 1/2 by 1 3/4 inches is a rectangle. A knife and ruler do the job, and a fluted pastry wheel gives a better edge than a plain blade. The "lady-finger cutter" the recipe mentions is not described; nothing is lost by ignoring it.
- White of eggUse the white alone, lightly beaten and loosened with a few drops of water so it brushes thin. Whole egg or yolk browns faster and will darken before the pastry has risen.
- Cinnamon and sugarNo proportion is given. One tablespoon granulated sugar to a scant half teaspoon cinnamon is a workable ratio; coarse or sanding sugar holds its crunch better than superfine.
- Handling puff scrapsIf using puff paste, stack the trimmings rather than balling them up, and chill the cut strips 15 minutes before baking so the butter is firm going into the heat.
- YieldA single sheet of rolled paste, roughly 10 by 15 inches, gives about 20 strips. They are best the day they are baked and go soft in a covered tin.
The name is a puzzle: it is most likely an Anglicized or variant spelling of the French galette, the general term for a flat cake or round of pastry. The recipe is essentially a way of using up rolled paste, though the text itself does not say it is meant for trimmings. The aside that a lady-finger cutter "is more difficult to procure" is a small window on the period's kitchen-equipment trade, when specialized tinware was sold by shape and was not always easy to come by.