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Patty Cases
Roll puff-paste to the thickness of one-half inch, and shape into circles two and one-half to three inches in diameter, with a cooky-cutter. Remove centers from one-half of these circles, using a smaller cutter. Brush the edges of the uncut circles with water, and fit on to them the rings, forming a little wall and leaving a cavity in the center. Chill thoroughly before baking in a hot oven. These shells may be prepared the day before and reheated when needed. The small centers removed from the puff-paste circles should also be baked and used as lids to the patties when finished.
A method rather than a recipe: two rounds of puff paste stacked into a shell that rises into a hollow case. Almost everything depends on temperature and on cutting cleanly.
- "Hot oven"In books of this period a hot or quick oven is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F; the original gives no temperature or time. Roughly 425F for the first 12-15 minutes to drive the lift, then dropping to about 350F for another 10-15 minutes, will help dry the interior layers so the case does not collapse.
- Chilling is the hingeThe instruction to chill thoroughly is the whole technique. Cases that go into the oven with soft butter in the layers will lean, weep fat and rise unevenly. Thirty minutes in the freezer or an hour in the refrigerator after shaping, and bake straight from cold.
- Cut straight downPress the cutter down and lift it; do not twist. A twisted edge seals the laminations together and the wall rises crooked or not at all. A sharp metal cutter dipped in flour beats a dull one.
- Half an inch is thickThe recipe specifies half-inch paste, which with base and ring together gives a tall, substantial case, perhaps two inches high depending on the paste. Rolling to a quarter inch yields a shallower, more manageable bouch"},{
- Water as the glueBrush only the ring of paste that will be covered, and use water sparingly. Egg wash between the layers will glue the leaves shut; egg wash on top only, kept off the cut edges, gives colour without stopping the rise.
- Puff-pasteThe original assumes a laminated dough made at home. All-butter commercial puff pastry works, but roll it out no more than lightly, since it is already at or near its final thickness in the box.
- The lidsThe small centres bake much faster than the cases. Pull them at 10-12 minutes or bake them on a separate sheet, or they will be dark by the time the shells are done.
- Holding and reheatingBaked shells keep a day in an airtight tin and refresh in a 350F oven for 5 minutes. Fill only at the moment of serving; any sauce sitting in the cavity softens the base within minutes.
- YieldA pound of puff paste rolled to half an inch gives roughly eight to ten three-inch cases, allowing one or two per person as an entrée.
Patty cases are the American household version of the French vol-au-vent and its smaller sibling the bouchée "filled the mouth" — hollow puff-paste shells built to hold a creamed filling of chicken, sweetbreads, oysters or mushrooms. The technique is generally traced to early nineteenth-century Parisian pastry work, and it reached English and American kitchens as a mark of a properly served entrée course. Its place here, in a chapter on entrées and made-over dishes, is telling: a patty case was the standard way to dignify yesterday's cooked meat, since a cupful of leftover fowl bound in white sauce and set inside a crisp shell reads as a course rather than a remainder. Butterick's readers were running households without a professional pastry cook, and the note that the shells may be made the day before is the practical heart of the entry.