Hand-Book of Practical Cookery, for Ladies and Professional Cooks: Containing the Whole Science and Art of Preparing Human Food

to bore a hole on the top of the range or stove, reaching the oven, and have a thermometer with the bulb inclosed in a brass sheath, perforated, long enough to reach the oven, and of the size of the hole bored--the glass tube being above the top of the range. _Pastes._--There are several kinds of paste. Puff-paste is the most important; it can be made very rich, rich, and less so; and several hundred different cakes can be made with it. Small cakes are called _petits fours_. The next in importance is the _pâte-à-choux_; then the paste for meat-pies, sometimes called _pâte brisée_. Puff-paste requires care, but is easily made; _pâte-à-choux_ must be well worked. _Puff-paste._--To make good puff-paste, good flour and butter, free from salt or sour milk, are indispensable. It must be made in a cool place. Take half a pound of good butter and knead it well in a bowl of cold water; if fresh and not salt, the kneading will take the sour milk out of it; if salty, it will remove the salt, then put it in another bowl of cold water and leave it till it is perfectly firm, and then use. When the butter is ready, put half a pound of flour on the paste-board or marble, make a hole in it, in which you put a pinch of salt, and cold water enough to make a rather stiff dough. It requires about half a pint of water, knead well, make a kind of ball with the dough, and put it on a corner of your marble or paste-board. Take the butter from the water and knead it on the board, to press all the water out of it. Give it the shape of a large sausage; dredge the board slightly with flour, roll the butter over only once, as it must take very little of it, dredge both ends of the piece of butter with flour also, then by putting one end on the board and pressing on the other end with your hands, you will flatten it of a rather