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.

One 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 pastry-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 unavoid-ble 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; whereas, in nineteen cases out of twenty, the butter he uses is in a semi-state of liquefaction, and utterly unlit to mix with the flour.

If, then, you cannot command a good supply of excel-lent 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 perfect-ly 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.

Keep the bowl of suet in a cool place; in the ice-box if possible.

The fat that is skimmed from the surface of the soup-kettle is just as valuable, for it is generally the melted marrow from the broken shin: you do not get much of it, I know, probably a breakfast-cupful, at the outside, but it is quite first-rate, and the favourite frying medium of the great Careme. The fat from the under-cut of a cold roast sirloin can be made use of exactly in the same way as the raw suet: clarify it according to the rules already given, and pour it into an earthenware bowl.

Lard is imported here during the colder months of the year; it requires the assistance of ice to regain its original firmness of character, and then, if carefully used, it affords an excellent ingredient wherewith to compose a good light pie-crust.

As I said before, the water used in pastry-making should certainly be slightly iced: it need not be as cold as that we like to drink, but it should be decidedly cold to the touch.

For puff paste the following directions may, I think, be depended upon :-

Having the following ingredients ready:- a bowl of cold, well clarified suet, some dry well-sifted flour, a good ripe lime, some salt, and a jug of iced water, proceed as follows :- weigh a pound of flour, and turn it out upon your cold marble slab, make a hollow in its centre, and fill it with half an ounce of salt, and a quarter of a pint of the cold water; mix the flour gradually with the water, and when this is done, and the paste half mixed, sprinkle over it another quarter pint of water in which the lime has been squeezed. Mix it all now thoroughly, until it ceases to adhere to the slab, and pat it into a round ball. Now take one pound weight of the clarified suet, cut it up into dice, and flatten out the ball of paste to a thickness of about two inches, spreading the suet evenly over its surface; then fold the four sides of the paste to the centre enclosing the suet, and forming a square piece. Roll this evenly out a yard long, then fold over one-third of the length towards the centre, and fold the other third over it. This folding in three is called by cooks "giving the paste one turn." Be careful that none of the suet breaks through the edges of the paste as you roll it out. Having folded up the paste, let it rest for ten minutes in the ice-box, or on a very cold slab. Then give it two turns, re3t ten minutes, then two turns more, - five rolls out in all, - lastly, gather the paste into a lump, and roll it according to your requirements.

For patties, vols-au-vent, etc., seven turns are recommended by some authors. Keep the flour dredger at your elbow, and flour the rolling-pin well before each turn. The sooner the paste is used when it has been completed the better.

If you have a little good iced butter, you may alter the above proportions as follows :- three-quarters of a pound of suet, and one-quarter of a pound of butter. The yolks of two eggs well beaten and strained may be mixed with the water.

Baking powder may be used advantageously in pastry-making : here is Yeatman & Co.'s recipe for puff paste made in connection with their powder :-

Measure three breakfast-cupfuls of flour, carefully sifted, and two cupfuls of butter. Choose a cool place to work in, see that the flour is good and dry, the butter firm and free from moisture, and fill two shallow baking-tins with broken ice. Put the flour on a cool slab, mixing into it a heaped up tea-spoonful of the baking powder; when mixed, form the flour in a ring, as it were, and in the centre throw the yolk of an egg and a tea-spoonful of salt; add a little iced water, and gradually work the flour into it from the inside of the ring, sprinkling additional water as you require it - about one breakfast-cupful altogether - until you have a smooth, fine dough, free from all stickiness. Pat this into a lump, and put it in the ice-box for a quarter of an hour, then roll it out about the size of a dinner plate : put the butter upon it, and wrap the edges of the dough over it, carefully covering it: now turn it upside down, and roll it out very thin; reverse it again, and fold it in three. Place it after this on a baking-sheet over one of the pans of broken ice, and put the other pan of ice upon it. Repeat this cooling process between each double turn, and use as soon as possible when five turns have been completed.