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Cornstarch Pastry
1 1/4 cupfuls cornstarch 1 1/4 cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 cupful Crisco 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking powder 1 yolk of egg Milk to mix Rub Crisco lightly into cornstarch and flour, add salt, sugar, baking powder, beaten-yolk of egg, and sufficient milk to mix to stiff paste. Roll out lightly and use for tartlets or one crust pie.
Sufficient for two large pies.
A short crust in which half the flour is replaced by cornstarch, giving a crumbly, almost shortbread-like shell. The original gives quantities but no baking directions at all, so the notes below fill that gap.
- The hinge: handle it as little as possibleCornstarch contributes no gluten, so this dough has only half the usual structure holding it together. Mix until it just coheres, roll once, and expect it to crack and patch rather than stretch.
- CriscoStill sold, and still the intended fat: a solid all-vegetable shortening. Half a cup is 4 oz. Use it cold and cut it in only to the coarse-crumb stage; warm shortening rubbed in fully gives a greasy, dense crust.
- "Milk to mix"Reckon on 4 to 6 tablespoons of cold milk for the full quantity, added a spoonful at a time. "Stiff paste" means a dough that holds a fingerprint and is not at all sticky, drier than you would make a modern all-butter crust.
- Baking powderOne teaspoon is called for in this much flour; baking powder does turn up in a number of pastry recipes of the period. It lifts a crust that would otherwise be rather solid, so keep it in, and there is no reason to increase it.
- Chill before rollingNot in the original, but worth 30 minutes in the refrigerator. It relaxes the dough and firms the shortening, which makes a cornstarch pastry far easier to lift into a tin.
- Oven, since none is givenFor blind-baked tartlets or a single pie shell, 425F for 12 to 15 minutes until faintly coloured. A filled one-crust pie goes in at 425F for 15 minutes, then 350F until the filling sets. Watch closely: cornstarch crusts brown suddenly at the edges.
- YieldThe recipe says only 'sufficient for two large pies'; no diameter is given. Reckon roughly 18 to 24 tartlet shells depending on the tin.
- What it is good forTender and short rather than flaky, so it suits custards, lemon fillings and jam tartlets. It is a poor choice for anything wet and long-baking, and likely a poor choice for a top crust; the recipe directs it to tartlets or a one-crust pie.
This comes from a book published to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening that Procter & Gamble brought to market in 1911; the cookbooks of the following decade are full of recipes written to demonstrate that the new fat could do everything lard and butter did. Cornstarch had been sold in boxes for household baking since the mid-nineteenth century, and the technique survives in the very short, sandy crusts still used for tartlets.