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Rice Paste for Tarts
Sift one-half pound of ground rice, and rub it into one-fourth pound of fresh butter; mix and knead this into a little paste with a small quantity of cold water. Sprinkle flour over a paste-board and rolling-pin, and roll out the paste fairly thin. Chop one-fourth pound of butter into small bits, and stick them all over the paste. After this fold, and roll it out again three times, each time sprinkling flour over the paste and under it, all over the paste-board and rolling-pin. Cover the tarts, brush the paste over with well-beaten whites of eggs, sprinkle it with powdered sugar, and bake.
A rough puff pastry made with rice flour rather than wheat, used only as a top crust for tarts. The original assumes you know how a laminated paste behaves, and gives neither oven temperature nor yield.
- Weights in cupsHalf a pound of ground rice is about 1 1/2 cups of rice flour; a quarter pound of butter is one stick (8 tablespoons). The recipe uses two separate quarter-pounds of butter, one rubbed in and one dotted on for the folds, so half a pound of butter in total.
- Ground rice is rice flourNineteenth-century "ground rice" was a coarse rice flour sold by weight. Modern fine rice flour works, but the coarser stone-ground kind is closer to what a period kitchen would have used, and gives a slightly sandy bite.
- It has no gluten, so treat it gentlyThis is the hinge. Rice flour builds no gluten network, so the dough will not stretch and will crack at the edges of every fold. Press cracks back together rather than working the dough, and expect a short, crumbly crust rather than a tall flaky one. Some bakers cut rice flour with wheat flour to get a paste that will roll without splitting.
- "A small quantity of cold water"Genuinely unspecified, and it varies with the flour. Add a tablespoon at a time until the mass just coheres when squeezed; rice flour absorbs water differently from wheat and an over-wet paste will steam rather than crisp.
- Flour for dustingThe original says only "flour". If you want the crust to stay purely rice, dust the board and pin with rice flour rather than wheat.
- Chill between foldsNot in the original. Rest the paste 20 minutes in the refrigerator after the second fold, or the dotted butter will smear into the flour instead of staying in layers.
- Oven temperatureNone given; the recipe says only "bake". As a modern starting point, a hot oven of about 400-425F will turn the butter to steam quickly; drop to 375F if the filling needs longer than about 25 minutes.
- The glazeEgg white and powdered sugar brushed on before baking sets into a thin crackled crust. Apply it in a very thin coat, since the sugar can scorch.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; roughly enough to cover two 9-inch tarts, or the lids of several smaller ones. It makes a top crust only; line the pan with an ordinary short pastry.
Rice paste belongs to a long line of pastries built on ground rice, which was a standard grocery item through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and appears frequently in English and American cookery for puddings, cakes and biscuits. Cooks valued it for cheapness and for the dry, sandy texture it gave, and it was sometimes recommended for invalid cookery on the grounds that it was thought easier to digest than wheat. The folding-and-dotting method described here is what would now be called a rough puff, a more forgiving technique than the classical butter block, and one well suited to a flour that will not stretch.