No. 149

Tart Paste

Pate a Tarte

Make a paste on the table with three-quarters of a pound of flour, a quarter of a pound of arrowroot or fecula, half a pound of butter, three egg-yolks, two gills of cold water and a tablespoonful of sugar, adding a little salt. When the paste is smooth, wrap it up in a cloth, and leave it to rest for twenty-five minutes.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A rich sweet short paste for open fruit tarts, from Ranhofer's chapter of foundation preparations. It behaves like a pâte sucrée cut with starch, which keeps it tender and pale.

Weights in gramsThree-quarters of a pound of flour is about 340 g (roughly 2 3/4 cups), a quarter pound of starch about 115 g, half a pound of butter 225 g. Weighing matters more here than usual because the starch and flour behave differently by volume.
Two gills of waterA gill is reckoned at four fluid ounces, half a cup, so two gills is one cup — a great deal of liquid for this much flour, and likely more than you will need once the three yolks are counted. Add it a few tablespoons at a time and stop as soon as the dough coheres.
Fecula"Fecula" means plain starch, in practice potato starch; arrowroot is the stated alternative and cornstarch works the same way. Its job is to dilute the gluten so the shell stays crumbly rather than chewy.
Butter temperatureThe recipe says nothing about it, but use butter that is pliable rather than greasy, and work it in quickly with the fingertips or a bench scraper; melted butter gives a paste that bakes hard.
Making it on the tableThe classic well method — flour and starch in a ring, butter, yolks, sugar and salt in the centre, worked to a paste and then fraised outward with the heel of the hand. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse only until it clumps.
The restTwenty-five minutes in a cloth is the hinge of the recipe: it lets the starch hydrate and the gluten slacken so the paste rolls without springing back. Wrap in plastic and rest it in the refrigerator, and give it longer than twenty-five minutes if the kitchen is warm.
Baking itNo temperature is given; this is an elementary method to be used inside other recipes. Blind-bake a lined tart ring at around 375°F until the edges are set and just colouring, then fill.
YieldClose to a kilogram of paste if all the water is used, less if you stop early; enough for two or three 9-inch tart shells. It freezes well, wrapped, for a month.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Elementary Methods" section is essentially a French kitchen's stock of building blocks, numbered so that later recipes can call for them by reference. The paste itself is a variant of pâte sucrée, distinguished by the quarter-pound of arrowroot or potato starch standing in for part of the flour, which weakens the dough and produces a shell that shatters rather than bends. "Fecula" was a common term of the period for refined starch.