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Pate a Pate--Paste for Game Pie
Sift two and a half pounds flour on table, make a small fountain in centre, place in it a pound butter, a pint cold water and teaspoon salt. Mix very carefully butter, water and salt together for four minutes and gradually incorporate flour, sharply knead until thoroughly smooth, which will take about five minutes, then envelop paste in cloth and keep in ice box for an hour before using.
This is a working pastry for a raised or covered game pie: strong, low in fat compared with a short crust, and kneaded rather than handled gently. The quantities are professional-scale, so scale down before you start.
- Weights and volumesTwo and a half pounds of flour is roughly 9 cups (1.13 kg); a pound of butter is four American sticks (450 g); a pint of cold water is 2 cups (475 ml). The finished dough weighs about 4½ lb -- enough for a very large raised pie or more than one covered pie. Halve or quarter it for a single dish.
- The "fountain"This is the classic well in a mound of flour on the bench. Nothing is folded in at first: the butter, water and salt are worked to a smooth emulsion in the well, then flour is pulled in from the walls a little at a time.
- Butter temperatureStraight-from-the-fridge butter will not combine with cold water in four minutes. Let it sit until pliable — cool but dentable — or the dough will stay lumpy and streak when rolled.
- Knead it, and mean itThe instruction to "sharply knead" for five minutes is the hinge. Unlike short pastry, this crust is meant to develop gluten so it can stand up to a heavy game filling and a long bake without splitting. Underkneading, not overkneading, is the failure here.
- Water is a guide, not a ruleA full pint may suit the flour the recipe was written for. With modern all-purpose or bread flour, hold back a few tablespoons and add only what is needed for a firm, non-sticky dough that does not crack when pressed.
- The rest is not optionalAn hour in the "ice box" — any refrigerator — relaxes the gluten you just built and firms the butter so the paste rolls without tearing. Skipping it gives a crust that springs back and shrinks in the tin.
- Rolling and bakingRolling -- Roll about a quarter-inch thick for sides and lid, thicker at the base of a raised pie. No baking temperature is given here; this is a paste recipe only, and the baking would come from whatever pie it was used for.
Pâte à pâté is simply "paste for a pie," and in French professional usage the word pâté long meant the whole construction — meat baked in a pastry case — rather than the forcemeat alone. Crusts like this one began as containers and preservers: sturdy enough to be handled, cut and, in earlier centuries, sealed with clarified butter or jelly so that a pie of venison, hare or game birds could travel and keep. This pastry is genuinely edible rather than merely functional, but its structure still shows its origins in the high proportion of flour to butter and the deliberate kneading that no dessert pastry would tolerate. The scale of the recipe — two and a half pounds of flour at a stroke, mixed directly on the table — suggests a professional origin, though it does not by itself establish the kind of kitchen the formula came from.