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Paste for Ornamenting Tartlets
Rub one ounce of butter into four ounces of flour. Mix it to a stiff paste with a little cold water, rub it well on the board until it begins to string, then cut it into four or five pieces and roll them out, draw it into fine strings, and lay them across the tartlets in any fancied pattern.
A working pastry-cook's decorating paste rather than a dish in itself: a stiff, deliberately over-worked dough drawn into threads and laid across filled tartlets before baking. The whole point is the opposite of what you do with pie crust.
- Weights in cupsOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; four ounces of flour is a scant cup (about 115 g). The ratio is 1:4 by weight, so it scales cleanly if you need more.
- "Until it begins to string"This is the hinge. You are developing gluten on purpose, kneading and smearing the dough on the board until it turns elastic and tacky enough to pull into threads without snapping. A short, tender pastry would crumble the moment you tried to draw it.
- Water"A little cold water" is roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons. Add it a teaspoon at a time; the paste should be stiff and dry-looking, closer to a noodle dough than a pie dough.
- RestingAfter the kneading the paste will fight you. Ten minutes under a cloth relaxes it enough that the strings pull long and even instead of springing back.
- Drawing the stringsRoll each piece thin, then pull strands by hand or cut them with a knife or pastry wheel. Hand-drawn threads come out uneven; a lattice cutter gives a more mechanical result.
- No oven givenNone is needed here because the strings go onto tartlets already assembled and bake with them; in a modern oven, around 375-400F suits small pastries. Brush the threads with beaten egg or milk if you want them to colour.
- YieldFour ounces of flour makes enough lattice for roughly a dozen small tartlets. Offcuts can be re-kneaded and re-rolled without harm, since toughness is the aim.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection is a professional kitchen's working notebook as much as a household book, and this entry shows it: a component recipe with no dish attached, presumably to be turned to whenever a garnish was wanted. Decorative pastry-work of this kind belonged to the late Victorian dessert table, where jam tartlets and small filled pastries often arrived under a woven or trellised top. The technique is a small inversion of ordinary pastry logic, since the strings are deliberately toughened so they will hold a shape through the oven rather than shortened for eating quality. It is closely related to the lattice tops still put on fruit pies, and to the older ornamental practice of building sugar and flour paste into architectural centrepieces, a skill said to have survived in the hotel kitchens of Oscar's era.