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Crusts with Melted Fat
These are made by pouring the melted fat into the flour and mixing until all is fine, using one egg to each pound of flour. The proportions are: Flour one pound, drippings of lard or butter, six to twelve ounces-according to how short it is wanted-and one egg.
A hot-fat pastry given in the barest outline: no salt, no water, no baking instructions. The proportions are sound, but the technique behaves nothing like a rubbed-in cold-fat crust and should not be treated as one.
- The hinge: melted fat means a mealy crust, not a flaky onePouring warm fat into flour coats every particle before any gluten develops, so the result is short, crumbly and tender rather than layered. Do not expect flakes, and do not knead it in hope of them — working it after the fat is in only toughens it.
- A pound of flourAbout 3⅓ to 3½ cups, or 450 g. This makes a large batch — enough for perhaps two double-crust pies or three to four single shells — so halve it unless you are baking in quantity.
- Six to twelve ounces of fatWeight, not volume: 170 g to 340 g, that is roughly ¾ cup to 1½ cups. The low end gives a firm, workable crust; the high end is very rich and will be fragile to handle. Around 8 oz (225 g) is a reasonable middle.
- DrippingsRendered fat saved from roasting, usually beef or pork. Modern lard or shortening works in its place; butter contains water and milk solids, so a butter version will brown faster and taste less neutral. Beef drippings give a savoury note better suited to meat pies than to fruit.
- "How short it is wanted""Short" here is the old sense of the word behind "shortening" — fat interrupting the flour's structure so it breaks cleanly instead of stretching. More fat, shorter crust.
- Salt and liquidThe recipe gives neither. Add about 1½ teaspoons salt per pound of flour. One egg is very little moisture for 450 g of flour; expect to add a few tablespoons of cold water, a spoonful at a time, until the dough just coheres.
- Handling and restingMix while the fat is still warm, then let the dough cool and firm in the refrigerator for 30 minutes before rolling. Warm melted-fat dough is greasy and tears; chilled, it rolls well but is less forgiving of patching.
- BakingNo temperature is given. Pastry shells want a hot oven, 400–425F, blind-baked 15–20 minutes for an empty case; filled pies usually start hot and finish at 350F.
Melted-fat pastry belongs to the economical end of the kitchen, where the dripping jar beside the range was a standing resource rather than waste. Fat rendered from roasts was strained, kept, and used again for frying, for cake in poorer households, and for crusts like this one; butter for everything is often said to have been a mark of a well-off kitchen. The method also suits a warm kitchen: cold-fat pastry demands cool hands, cool marble and speed, while pouring warm fat into flour sidesteps all of that and gives a reliable, if unflaky, result. The compressed telegraphic style here — proportions stated, method assumed — suggests a reader presumed to have made pastry a hundred times already.