No. 136

Frolle Paste or Sweet

Pate a Frolle ou pate Sucree

Arrange one pound of sifted flour in a circle on the table; in the center lay half a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, the peel of a lemon, chopped very fine, a pinch of salt, one whole egg and four to five yolks. Work the whole well together to obtain a smooth paste, kneading it twice; form into a ball and put aside in the icebox to rest.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a rich egg-yolk sweet pastry — the French pâte sucrée — used in The Epicurean as the foundation for tart shells, fruit tarts and small cakes. Ranhofer gives weights and no temperatures, so a few numbers need filling in.

The weightsOne pound of flour is about 3½ cups (450 g); half a pound each of butter and sugar is 8 oz (225 g) apiece. This is a 2:1:1 ratio by weight, so it scales cleanly if you want half a batch.
Egg sizeEggs of the period were not standardised as they are now and may have run smaller than today's large. Ranhofer already allows a range, so start with one whole egg and four yolks and add the fifth only if the dough refuses to come together.
Lemon peel means zestTake only the coloured outer skin, not the white pith, and chop or grate it very fine. Pith turns the pastry bitter.
Sugar typeUse fine granulated or caster sugar. Coarse sugar will not dissolve in so little liquid and leaves the baked shell gritty and speckled.
"Kneading it twice"Ranhofer does not explain the phrase; it is plausibly the technique later known as fraisage — smear the dough away from you with the heel of the hand, gather it, and repeat once, which distributes the butter without developing gluten. Either way, stop as soon as it is smooth: this dough toughens faster than a plain pie crust.
Resting is not optionalRanhofer explicitly puts the ball aside in the icebox. At 8 oz of butter to the pound of flour the dough is slack and sticky when warm, so give it a good hour or two in the refrigerator, wrapped, and roll it cold and quickly; if it softens, return it to the cold rather than fighting it with more flour.
BakingRanhofer gives none. For a blind-baked tart shell, 350–375°F is right; it is high in sugar and colours fast, so check at 15 minutes and pull it at pale gold. Line and weight the shell, since the only liquid is egg and the walls slump readily.
YieldRoughly 2¼ lb of dough — enough for two 9-inch tart shells with trimmings, or something like three dozen small tartlets. It keeps a few days refrigerated and freezes well.

A Little History

Pâte à frolle appears in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he wrote after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York — a book arranged like a professional's reference rather than a home cookbook, which is why this entry sits in a numbered run of foundation doughs and batters with cross-references before and after it. The name is usually traced to the Italian pasta frolla, roughly "tender" or "crumbly paste," a standard sweet crust of Italian tarts and biscuits; Ranhofer, trained in France, gives it alongside the French gloss pâte sucrée. What distinguishes it from ordinary pie dough is what is missing: no added water, the eggs and yolks supplying the only liquid alongside the half-pound of butter, which keeps the baked crust short and sandy instead of flaky.