Home › Pastry › Preserve Puffs
Preserve Puffs
Roll out puff-paste very thin, cut into round pieces, and lay jam on each, fold over the paste, wet edges with white of an egg, and close them; lay them on a baking sheet, ice them, and bake about fifteen minutes. - Mrs. H. A. E.
A one-line turnover recipe that assumes you already know how to make and handle puff paste. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the meaning of "ice them," and how to keep the jam inside the pastry.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no heat. Puff paste of this period was generally baked in what such books call a "quick" oven, in modern terms roughly 425-450F, and fifteen minutes at that heat suits a small thin turnover; too cool an oven tends to let the butter run before the layers lift.
- "Ice them"In nineteenth-century pastry writing this usually means brushing the tops with beaten egg white and dusting with sifted sugar, which sets to a thin white glaze in the oven. It does not mean icing them after baking.
- Puff-pasteThe book assumes a homemade rough or full puff paste of flour, butter and ice water. A 1 lb package of all-butter frozen puff pastry, thawed and rolled thinner than it comes, stands in directly.
- How thin, how big"Very thin" is not defined; about 1/8 inch is a reasonable modern reading. Rounds of 3 to 4 inches are a usual size; a 1 lb block cut this way gives roughly 16 to 18 puffs.
- Filling amountA rounded teaspoon of jam per round, kept well clear of the edge. Jam boils and expands, and an overfilled puff will burst its seam and weld itself to the sheet.
- SealingEgg white is the glue here, not egg yolk. Press the edge firmly with a fork or crimp it, and chill the assembled puffs for 15 minutes before baking so the butter is cold going in.
- Baking sheetLine with parchment. Sugar-glazed pastry with leaking jam is difficult to lift off bare metal, and a greased sheet only encourages the bottoms to fry.
Small jam turnovers of this kind were a standard way of using up puff-paste trimmings and the surplus of a summer's preserving: they are an economy of the pastry board as much as a sweet. The name simply describes the contents, "preserve" being the ordinary word for the sealed jars of fruit and sugar that a Southern household put up by the dozen and then had to work through before the next season. The attribution to "Mrs. H. A. E." is typical of the compiled community cookbooks of the 1880s, in which contributors were credited by initials and their recipes printed at whatever length they happened to have written them - here, a single sentence to a cook who was expected to know the rest.