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Plain Paste
1½ cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. ½ teaspoon baking powder. 1/4 cup Cottolene.
Ice Water.
PROCESS: Mix and sift flour, salt and baking powder. Rub in Cottolene (reserving one and one-half tablespoons), with tips of fingers. Add just enough ice water to form a soft dough, mixing it in with a knife. Turn on a floured board and roll out in a thin sheet, spread lightly with remaining Cottolene. Roll like jelly roll and cut in two pieces, having one piece a trifle larger than the other. Chill. Then stand rolls on end, press down with the hand and roll in circular piece to fit pie pan. The larger piece is for the top crust. This recipe makes the exact quantity of pastry for one medium-sized pie with two crusts. If desired, omit baking powder.
A two-crust pie pastry built on the rolled-and-folded trick that gives flakiness without a full puff-pastry lamination. The recipe assumes one branded fat that no longer exists.
- CottoleneA shortening made largely from cottonseed oil, blended with beef suet, sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, the firm that issued this book. Substitute an equal measure of modern vegetable shortening, or lard if you want more flavour; both behave close enough at 1/4 cup.
- The hinge: keep the reserved fat solidThe 1 1/2 tablespoons smeared over the rolled sheet is what creates the layers. If the dough or the fat is warm the smear absorbs into the flour and you get one uniform crust instead of leaves. The chilling step after rolling is not optional.
- Standing the rolls on endThis is deliberate, not eccentric. Pressing down on the cut end and rolling from there keeps the spiral layers stacked horizontally, so they separate upward in the oven. Rolling the coil sideways would smear them shut.
- Ice water quantityUnstated, as was usual. Expect roughly 3 to 5 tablespoons for this much flour; add it a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed.
- The baking powderThe closing line offers to omit it. It puffs and slightly softens the crust rather than making it flaky, and a pastry this rich in layers does not need lift.
- YieldAs stated, exactly one two-crust pie; the book specifies only 'medium-sized', which would suit a pan of roughly 8 or 9 inches. There is no trim allowance, so roll thin and evenly rather than counting on scraps.
- BakingNo oven instruction is given here; presumably the filling recipe would have supplied it. A fruit pie in this style would want a hot start, around 425F for the first 15 minutes, then 350F until the filling bubbles.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was a promotional cookbook published to sell Cottolene, a shortening blended from cottonseed oil and beef suet that competed with lard, and the fat measurements in the book name the brand. Cottonseed had been an agricultural waste product until refiners found a way to make its oil palatable, and marketing to home cooks leaned hard on the idea that a vegetable fat was cleaner and more digestible than animal fat. The pastry technique here, rolling the dough around a smear of fat and coiling it like a jelly roll, is a household shortcut toward the layered pâte feuilletée of French practice, and versions of it turn up in American and British cookbooks throughout the period under names like flaky paste or half-puff paste.