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Paste for Cheese Cakes
Mix with one pound of best-sifted flour three ounces of powdered sugar. Beat eight ounces of butter till of a creamy consistence, then sift the flour and sugar gradually into it. When well mixed, work in the whole yolks of three eggs and the well-beaten whites of two. It is then ready for use. Paste for Custards or Preserved Fruits Put six ounces of butter over the fire in a saucepan with six tablespoonfuls of water, let it come to the boil, and then mix into it as much flour as will make a stiff paste, Knead and beat it with a rolling-pin till smooth, then form it into a lump, and cover with a cloth till almost cold. Take a piece of the paste large enough for the purpose, knead it into a lump, then press the knuckles of the left hand into the top nearly in the middle, and with the right hand keep working the paste up the back of the left hand, shifting it round and round meanwhile, forming the paste into a circular shape with a flat bottom and upright sides like an ordinary jam-pot. The paste ought to be stiff enough to keep in shape when the hand is withdrawn if it has not been pressed too thin or into holes. Trim the edges, line the paste with paper till half-baked, then remove the paper, pour in the custard or preserve, and finish baking.
Two pastries have run together in one paragraph here: a rich egg-and-butter sweet paste, and a hot-water crust raised by hand. They are made and handled quite differently, and the second is the one that needs attention.
- The measurements, convertedOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups (450 g); 3 oz powdered sugar is a scant 3/4 cup; 8 oz butter is two sticks (225 g). For the second paste, 6 oz butter is 1 1/2 sticks and six tablespoonfuls of water is a little under 1/2 cup.
- How much flour for the hot-water paste"As much flour as will make a stiff paste" is genuinely open-ended, but with 6 oz butter and 6 tablespoons water you will be somewhere near 10-12 oz (roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups). Add it in stages; the dough should be firm enough to hold a fingerprint, not slack.
- Work the hot crust warmThis is the hinge of the second recipe. Hot-water paste is pliable only while warm and turns brittle and uncooperative as it cools, so the shaping must be done quickly. The direction to 'cover with a cloth till almost cold' is probably best read as resting it only until it can be handled, rather than chilling it.
- The sweet paste goes the other wayThe first paste, being all butter, sugar and egg with no liquid, will be soft after mixing. Wrap and refrigerate it an hour before rolling, and chill the lined tins again before baking or the sides slump.
- "Line the paste with paper"This is blind baking without the word. Fit parchment inside the raised case and fill it with dried beans or pie weights, otherwise the upright walls of a hand-raised case collapse inward before they set.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Blind-bake the case until the sides are firm and pale, then fill and finish. Custard fillings in particular want a gentle heat, no more than about 325-350F, or they curdle and weep.
- YieldA pound of flour is a large batch by modern standards, enough sweet paste for a couple of large tarts or a good number of small cheesecakes. The hot-water quantity, depending on how much flour is worked in, will raise several individual cases of the jam-pot shape described.
- Egg proportionsThree whole yolks and two beaten whites is an unusual split; yolks enrich and tenderize, whites bind. Substituting two whole eggs would change the balance, and is best avoided.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel who put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, was a compiler rather than a cook, and much in the book reflects the English and French kitchen manuals then in circulation. The second paste is hot-water crust, a long-established English raised pastry, worked up over the knuckles of the left hand rather than rolled and fitted into a tin -- the same technique that produces a standing pork pie, here scaled down to a case the size of a jam-pot for custard or preserves. Its purpose was originally structural: before reliable tinned moulds, the pastry had to be its own vessel. The instruction to line the half-baked shell with paper is a nineteenth-century description of blind baking.