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Brioches Flutes
Make the brioche paste and lay it on a floured board and cut it into a dozen equal pieces. Roll each one separately with the hands until about ten inches in length, rounding into shape. Place on a baking-dish and leave in a hot closet for ten minutes to rise, then take out and glaze lightly with beaten eggs, sprinkle with powdered sugar and put in the oven for ten minutes, and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
A shaping-and-baking instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have brioche paste made and chilled from elsewhere in the book. A few of the terms need translating.
- The dough comes first"Brioche paste" is a rich yeasted dough with butter, eggs and a little sugar. Ten minutes of proving only makes sense if the dough has already had its bulk rise and been rested; freshly mixed dough will not rise in that time.
- Hot closetThe warming cupboard beside or above the range, used as a proofing box. Any spot around 80F does the same job. Ten minutes there is a brief final rise, appropriate to thin ropes of chilled dough.
- Baking-dishRead this as a flat baking sheet, not a deep dish. Line it, and leave room between the ropes, which spread as well as rise.
- ShapingTen inches from a twelfth of a batch gives a slim rope. Work quickly and keep the dough cool; butter-rich dough that warms up will tear and smear rather than roll.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For small, thin, egg-glazed pieces baking in ten minutes, something around 400-425F is a workable modern equivalent. Watch them from eight minutes; sugar on the surface will colour fast.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term usually means granulated sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster sugar than to cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar. Caster sugar gives the light crust the recipe is after.
- Yield and serviceTwelve flutes. Serving on a folded napkin was standard presentation for such items, and would also help hold the heat. Best eaten warm.
Brioche in flute form belongs to the French bread basket rather than the pastry case: the same enriched dough as the familiar fluted, top-knotted brioche à tête, but rolled into slender lengths that bake fast and are served warm. Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens around the turn of the twentieth century, and the printed instructions assume the reader already has the brioche paste in hand. The reliance on a "hot closet" for proving is a marker of the period's coal- and gas-fired ranges, which held useful warmth in cupboards and shelves around the oven.