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Paste for Patties
Sift one pound of the best white flour through a fine wire sieve onto a marble slab; mix with it a few drops of lemon-juice, a saltspoonful of salt, and stir it into a stiff paste with cold water. Squeeze the water out of one pound of butter by putting it in a cloth and working it well with both hands; then put it in the middle of the paste, fold the edges round it, and roll it out. Fold the paste in three, turn it round and roll it the other way. Let it rest for twenty minutes, then roll it twice more, and so on until it has been rolled six times. Next roll the paste out to the thickness of one-half inch, and with a plain tin cutter two and one-half inches in diameter, cut the paste into rounds; the cutter should be dipped into hot water each time it is used. Place the rounds on a baking-tin, brush them over with a paste-brush dipped in beaten egg, then with a tin cutter about one and one-half inches in diameter, cut half way through the center of each round. Bake them in a brisk oven, taking care not to let the paste brown too much. When the patties are cooked, lift the paste where the circle is marked, that being to form the covers, scoop out some of the paste and fill them with whatever has been prepared for them.
This is classic puff pastry — pâte feuilletée — at the full restaurant ratio of one pound butter to one pound flour, shaped into vol-au-vent cases. The instructions are complete; what they assume is a cold room and a cook who knows what "stiff" means.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the whole recipe. Butter that softens into the dough instead of staying in sheets gives a greasy, flat pastry rather than lift. The marble slab is temperature control, not decoration; if the butter starts to smear at any point, refrigerate the block for 20-30 minutes before continuing.
- Weights and small measuresOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 to 4 cups, but weigh it if you can — this dough depends on ratio. A saltspoonful is roughly 1/4 teaspoon. The recipe gives no water quantity; expect somewhere in the region of 7-10 fl oz depending on the flour, added gradually to a stiff, not slack, dough.
- "Best white flour"The recipe does not say which flour; the phrase points to a fine white flour rather than a particular strength. Modern all-purpose works, but bread flour or a 50/50 blend gives the gluten strength to hold six turns without tearing.
- Working the butterSqueezing butter in a cloth removes buttermilk and water, which nineteenth-century butter carried in quantity. Modern commercial butter is already at about 80-82% fat; skip the cloth and simply beat the cold butter into a flat square. European-style butter at 82-84% is closer still to what is wanted.
- Six turns, with restsEach "roll" here is a fold in three — six single turns in all, with 20 minutes' rest between pairs. Refrigerate during the rests rather than leaving the dough on the bench, and let the gluten relax fully or the pastry will shrink and pull out of round in the oven.
- "A brisk oven"Conventionally reckoned around 400-425F, and puff wants the upper end of that. High initial heat turns the water in the butter to steam and drives the layers apart. If the tops colour too fast, drop to about 375F to finish drying the interior — an underbaked case collapses when filled.
- The cuttersDipping in hot water gives a clean cut that does not seal the layers shut; a crushed edge will not rise. Cut straight down, no twisting. The inner cut goes only halfway through and becomes the lid.
- Yield and fillingA pound of flour at this ratio gives roughly 18-24 cases 2 1/2 inches across. Scoop out the soft centre while still warm, and fill just before serving — creamed sweetbreads, oysters, chicken and lobster were typical fillings of the period, and any wet filling will soften the shells within minutes.
Vol-au-vent cases like these were the workhorse of the American hotel dining room around 1900: a hot savoury filling could be made in bulk, held, and dropped into crisp shells to order, which suited both the à la carte kitchen and the long banquet menu. The technique itself is French and older — laminated pastry is generally traced to seventeenth-century France, and the phrase vol-au-vent, "flight in the wind", is usually credited by tradition to Antonin Carême's circle for the lightness of the risen case. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel rather than its chef, and his book reads as a record of what the house kitchen actually did; a straightforward pound-for-pound puff paste with a note about dipping the cutter in hot water is exactly the sort of instruction passed between working cooks rather than composed for beginners.