Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Transparent Paste for Tartlets
Transparent Paste for Tartlets
Warm twelve ounces of butter without oiling it; when nearly cold again, stir in one beaten egg, and continue beating for a little while; sift in with the butter and egg one pound of the finest dried white flour, and make a thin paste with it. Butter some patty-pans or tart-dishes, line them with the paste, brush over a little water and sift some fine sugar over; bake them at once in a moderate oven.
A rich short pastry for empty tartlet shells, baked blind and glazed with sugar so the surface bakes to a glassy, faintly translucent finish — hence "transparent." The whole thing hinges on butter temperature.
- "Warm without oiling"The butter must be softened to a smooth paste but never allowed to melt and separate into clear fat. Once it oils, the pastry is likely to bake greasy and heavy. Aim for the texture of thick mayonnaise, then let it cool — as the recipe says, until "nearly cold" — before adding the egg.
- Proportions12 oz butter to 1 lb flour and one egg — about 1 1/2 cups butter to 3 1/2 cups flour. That is a very high proportion of fat, richer than either an ordinary pie crust or a French pâte sucrée, and the dough will feel soft rather than crumbly.
- "Finest dried white flour"Flour was warmed and dried near the fire to drive off cellar damp before measuring. Modern bagged flour needs none of this; sift plain all-purpose and use it as is.
- "A thin paste"Genuinely ambiguous. There is no liquid here beyond one egg, so "thin" means soft and pliable rather than pourable. If it will not come together, chill it briefly and press it into the tins rather than adding water, which would toughen it.
- Patty-pansShallow tartlet tins, roughly 2 to 2 1/2 inches across. A standard 12-cup mini muffin pan works, though the shells will be deeper than intended. This quantity of paste should line something on the order of two to three dozen small tins, depending on how thinly it is rolled.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. The sugared surface wants to set and gloss, not caramelize; much hotter and the exposed sugar risks scorching before the pastry cooks through.
- Bake at onceProbably not a stylistic flourish. The water brushed on dissolves the sifted sugar, and if the shells stand the syrup may soak into the pastry instead of forming a thin glaze on top.
- ServingThe recipe produces empty shells and says nothing about filling them; tartlet cases of this kind were normally filled after baking. Filling before baking would defeat the glazed top.
"Transparent" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pastry work described a finish rather than a flavor: a crust or icing that baked to a clear, glassy surface, the same sense preserved in transparent puddings and transparent pies. Recipes of this kind — enormous quantities of butter beaten soft, flour worked in without water — belong to the English rich paste traditions, and Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book of 1896 absorbed a great deal of that English and French professional repertoire wholesale. The instruction to dry the flour is a genuine period necessity that survived into print long after it was needed: flour stored in sacks in damp basements picked up enough moisture to throw off a baker's proportions, and warming it at the fire was the only correction available.