Orange Sticks
Cut puff or plain paste rolled one-eighth inch thick in strips five inches long by one inch wide, and bake in hot oven. Put together in pairs, with Orange Filling between.
A two-line assembly note of the kind Farmer used constantly: it assumes you already have pastry and a filling on hand elsewhere in the book. The whole thing hinges on baking the strips hard and dry, then filling them shortly before serving.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no figures, so this is a modern reading: a hot oven, somewhere around 425-450F. Puff paste needs high heat to throw steam and lift; at a gentler temperature the butter leaks out and the strips fry flat. Strips this thin bake quickly, so watch them.
- Plain pasteFarmer's plain paste is an ordinary pie crust of flour, fat, salt and cold water, the fat well short of the quantity of flour. Any all-butter pie dough works; the strips will be crisp rather than layered.
- Rolling and cuttingOne-eighth inch is about the usual thickness for a rolled crust. Chill the sheet firm before cutting so the strips keep their straight edges, and cut with a knife or pastry wheel in one decisive stroke rather than dragging, which seals the layers of puff paste and stops it rising.
- Prick or don'tFor plain paste, dock the strips with a fork so they stay flat and pair up neatly. For puff paste, leave them undocked if you want height, and expect to trim or press the tops slightly to get matching pairs.
- Orange FillingThe cross-reference is to Farmer's cooked filling: orange juice and grated rind thickened with sugar, egg and a little flour or cornstarch, then cooled. It must be cold and set before it goes between the strips or it will soak straight through.
- Assemble lateFilled more than an hour ahead, the pastry softens. Bake the strips in advance, store them airtight, and sandwich them shortly before they go to the table.
- YieldThe original gives none, and the count depends entirely on how much pastry you roll; the strips are then paired, so the number of finished sticks is half the number of strips.
Orange Sticks belong to the run of small pastry oddments that Fannie Merritt Farmer tucked into the pastry chapters of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book: little more than a note telling the cook to combine two things already described on earlier pages. That cross-referencing was one of the book's defining habits and one reason it worked as a teaching text -- once you had learned puff paste and a cooked fruit filling, you were expected to recombine them at will. Oranges themselves were an ordinary winter luxury in Boston kitchens of the 1890s.