Raspberry Puffs
Roll plain paste one-eighth inch thick, and cut in pieces four by three and one-half inches. Put one-half tablespoon raspberry jam on centre of lower half of each piece, wet edges half-way around, fold, press edges firmly together, prick tops, place on sheet, and bake twenty minutes in hot oven.
A turnover in miniature, built from ordinary pie pastry and a spoonful of jam. Almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of sealing and temperature.
- "Plain paste"Farmer's plain paste is standard pie pastry: flour, cold fat, salt, ice water, no sugar and no egg. Any all-butter or shortening single-crust dough you already use will behave the same way.
- "Hot oven"The book gives no numeric temperatures; "hot" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. The high heat sets the crust before the jam has time to soak through the bottom; a slow oven gives pale, soggy puffs.
- Wetting the edgesWater alone is a weak glue for pastry that will be handled. Brush the edge lightly and press with a fork rather than fingertips, and chill the sealed puffs for 15 minutes before baking so the seams hold.
- Why only half-way aroundThe fold itself closes one side, and only one of the two surfaces that meet needs moistening, so the edge of half the perimeter is enough. The recipe does not explain the instruction.
- Pricking the topsTwo or three small vents, not decorative slashes. Jam boils and expands, and an unpricked puff splits at the seam and empties itself onto the sheet.
- Jam quantityHalf a tablespoon looks stingy and is correct. A thick, well-set jam works far better than a loose modern low-sugar preserve, which will run.
- "Place on sheet"A flat baking sheet, ungreased or lined with parchment. Leave an inch between puffs so the sides brown rather than steam.
- Yield and timingTiming -- twenty minutes suits a hot oven; check at fifteen. Cool at least ten minutes, since the jam comes out of the oven near boiling.
Small folded pastries filled with jam appear throughout nineteenth-century English and American cookery under a shifting set of names -- puffs, turnovers, jam tarts -- and Fannie Farmer's version is a characteristically economical one, made from the same plain paste as a pie. Its placement in the pie chapter rather than among the cakes is telling: the puff belongs to the world of pastry, not of cake-making. Raspberry is the default filling here, and a jam thick with sugar is exactly what keeps the filling from flooding the pastry in a hot oven.