No. 141

Milan Paste

Pate a Milan

Form a hollow in the center of a pound of flour on the table, lay in it half a pound of butter, half a pound of sugar, a little salt and three eggs; mix well and knead the dough twice, then put it aside to rest in a cool place.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is a sweet enriched short paste — Ranhofer's building block for tart shells, timbale cases and small fancy pastries rather than a finished dish. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the butter cold and the handling brief.

The proportions in cupsA pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups; half a pound of butter is two sticks; half a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups granulated. Weighing is far more reliable here, since the dough has almost no liquid beyond the eggs.
"A little salt"Fresh (unsalted) butter was usual for fine pastry work, so figure about 1/2 teaspoon of fine salt for the full pound of flour. If using salted butter, omit it.
EggsEggs in the 1890s were not graded as they are now and tended to run smaller than today's large eggs. Three modern large eggs may give a slightly wetter dough; hold the third back and add only as much as you need to bring the flour together.
The well on the tableThe hollow in the flour is the classic bench method: butter, sugar, salt and eggs are worked to a paste in the center with the fingertips, then flour is drawn in from the walls. A bowl works identically, and a food processor pulsed in short bursts works faster, but stop the moment the mass coheres.
"Knead the dough twice"This most likely does not mean develop gluten, but rather fraisage — smearing the dough forward across the bench with the heel of the hand, gathering it, and repeating once. Two passes distribute the butter without overworking it; more handling tends to toughen the baked paste.
RestingA cool place meant a larder or ice-cooled store rather than a modern refrigerator. Wrap and chill at least an hour, or overnight; the dough is very rich and will be unrollable straight from mixing and rock-hard straight from cold storage, so let it sit out 10-15 minutes before rolling.
Baking, which the original omitsNo oven is specified because the paste is used in other recipes. Blind-baked as a tart shell it wants a moderate oven, 350-375F, for 15-20 minutes; the sugar means it colors fast, so watch the edges.
YieldAbout 2 1/4 lb of dough — enough for two or three 9-inch tart shells, or three to four dozen small tartlets. It freezes well in flattened disks.

A Little History

Pâte à Milan appears in the Elementary Methods chapter of Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled from three decades as chef of Delmonico's in New York. The elementary section is essentially a workshop manual: a numbered sequence of pastes, meringues, forcemeats and stocks that the several hundred later recipes refer back to by number, which is why this entry stops without saying what to do with the dough. The name points to the Italian pastry tradition — a sweet, egg-and-butter-rich short paste of the family that Italian bakers call pasta frolla — and its presence beside plain meringue and noodle paste shows how thoroughly the French professional kitchen of the period had absorbed and catalogued Italian technique. Whether the paste has any documented connection to Milan itself is doubtful; nineteenth-century kitchen French attached city names to preparations freely, as a shorthand for a style rather than a claim of origin.