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Half Puff Paste
This is made as for puff paste, using twelve ounces of flour, one-fourth of an ounce of salt, ten ounces of butter and one teacupful of water, keeping the paste very firm.
Puff Paste Made with Beef Suet To prepare puff paste with beef suet chop the suet very fine, put it in a mortar and pound to a pulp, adding gradually sufficient olive oil to give it a body and to make it as easy to work as butter. When thoroughly worked up mix in the flour as for ordinary puff paste. Lard may be substituted for oil, using half lard and half beef suet.
Two variants on the same lamination, written for cooks who already knew the puff paste method and needed only the ratios. The proportions are the useful part; everything else has to be inferred from standard practice.
- The weights in cupsTwelve ounces of flour is about 2 3/4 cups; ten ounces of butter is 2 1/2 sticks. A quarter ounce of salt is roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons, which is correct for this quantity and should not be cut.
- "One teacupful of water"A teacup in a hotel kitchen of this period is smaller than a modern measuring cup; it is often reckoned at around 6 fluid ounces, though the measure was never fixed. Add it cold and hold some back: flour hydration varies, and the recipe's own instruction to keep the paste very firm matters more than using every drop.
- Why "half" puff pasteFull puff paste runs butter and flour close to equal by weight. At ten ounces butter to twelve of flour this is a shortened, less explosive lamination, of the kind used for pie lids, vol-au-vent bases, tart shells and trimmings, where you want flake but not four inches of lift. It corresponds broadly to what a French kitchen would call demi-feuilletage, though that term more often refers to pastry re-rolled from trimmings.
- The instruction that decides the outcome"Keeping the paste very firm" is the hinge. The détrempe and the butter must be the same firmness, near 60F, or the butter either shatters into shards or smears into the dough and you get shortcrust. Rest the paste in the refrigerator between turns and stop the moment it feels soft.
- The folds are assumedThe book says only "as for puff paste" and leaves the method to you: enclose the butter block, then give the paste a series of turns — a turn being a roll-out and a fold in three — resting it in the cold between turns. Four to six turns is the usual range, with about 30 minutes' chilling per rest.
- BakingThe recipe gives no oven instruction. Laminated paste is normally baked hot — around 425F in a modern oven — so the water in the butter flashes to steam before the layers set; a slack oven melts the butter out and the paste sits flat and greasy.
- The suet versionBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys, sold by butchers and some supermarkets as fresh or shredded suet; packaged "suet" for baking is often vegetable shortening and will behave differently. Pounding it with oil is a way of turning a brittle fat into a plastic one — a food processor does the same work, but keep the mixture cold and firm it in the refrigerator before rolling.
- What suet paste is forSuet's higher melting point tends to give a drier, less airy result than butter paste, and it carries a beefy flavor, so it suits savory work — meat pies and patty cases — rather than anything sweet.
- YieldThis quantity comes to roughly 1 3/4 pounds of paste — enough for two 9-inch pie lids, or roughly two dozen small patty shells.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 cook book reads as a professional reference rather than a home manual: the puff paste entries assume a pastry cook who needs the proportions and nothing else. Half puff paste is often connected with the French demi-feuilletage, though that term classically denotes trimmings pastry; either way it is the working pastry of a hotel kitchen, where full puff paste was reserved for showpieces and the trimmings and shortened versions did the daily labor of pie tops and patty cases. The suet variant is a reminder of how recently butter was a seasonal and expensive commodity even in a grand hotel — beef fat was abundant in a kitchen breaking down its own carcasses, and pastry made with rendered or pounded animal fat is generally thought to have been unremarkable rather than eccentric. The trick of pounding suet with oil to give it the plasticity of butter looks very much like the problem industrial shortening would come to address, and hydrogenated vegetable fats were displacing exactly this kind of hand-worked paste in the decades after the book appeared.