Culinary jottings

A most important feature in pastry is its baking. Too slack, or too fierce an oven, will destroy all the careful work I have just described. A good hot oven is required, sufficiently brisk to raise the pastry, yet not severe enough to burn or even scorch it. Ramasamy is inclined to err on the side of extreme heat, which, I think, accounts for those harsh, talc-like slabs of pale brown crust, piled up one on top of the other, which so many of us are forced to accept as " puff-paste." The higher that these layers of talc have " done raise it uff," the more successful does Ramasamy consider himself . " Erroneous vassal !" Puffpastry cannot be too white, or too volatile ; so fragile indeed should it be that it ought e'en to crumble to atoms if stricken with a feather. And now for a few words touching ingredients : — The flour used should be the best imported, and in a moist climate, such as this, it is a sine qua non that it should be dried in the oven and sifted to begin with, for the presence of damp in flour ruins pastry. Oue of the chief causes of failure in attaining light crust is the moisture and oiliness of our butter. All Madras-made butter is full of water, and even English butter requires close pressure before the pastrj-cook dare use it. Butter for this purpose should be firm, not frozen like a stone, but quite hard enough to cut into pieces. A judicious use of ice for this ingredient is therefore unavoidable if you desire to use it with success in pastry. It is on this account, I fancy, that Ramasamy has discovered that suet makes lighter puff paste in this climate than butter : it is firm, dry, and capable of being chopped up and strewn over the dough ; Avhereas, in nineteen cases out of twenty, the butter he uses is in a semi-state of liquefaction, and utterly unfit to mix with the flour. If, then, you cannot command a good supply of excellent butter, and undertake that it shall be iced as I have described, you will find it better far, as a rule, to use clarified beef suet for all ordinary pastry. Proceed in this way : procure as much good, pale yellow, fresh suet from a sirloin of beef (that surrounding the kidney is the best), and cut it into pieces. Place a large sauce-pan or stew-pan on the fire, and fill it nearly full of water ; when the water boils, throw in the fat. By degrees it will melt, the skin and impure fragments will sink, and a rich oil will float upon the surface of the water, which should be kept at a simmering pitch. When satisfied that the whole of the fat has melted, suspend operations, take the pan from the fire, and let it get cold ; when cold, the clarified fat will become congealed upon the surface of the water. Now, take it off in flakes, drain every drop of water from it, and put it into a clean sauce-pan ; melt it again, and strain it through a piece of muslin into an earthenware bowl. The fat will again consolidate, — in a firm, pale yellow cake, as it were, — far harder than butter, though quite as sweet and clean, and the very thing you want for ordinary pastry and delicate saute work. Suet thus clarified will keep perfectly good a long time, and is infinitely cleaner and nicer than raw suet freshly handled by the butcher, and goodness knows by how many other people.