Home › Pastries › Hot Water Paste
Hot Water Paste
1 cupful flour 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/3 teaspoonful salt 1/4 teaspoonful baking powder 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Sift flour, salt and baking powder into basin, rub Crisco lightly into them, then stir in boiling water. Cool paste before using, or it will be too sticky to handle.
Sufficient for one pie.
A short, sturdy pastry built the way English hot-water crust is built, but with hydrogenated shortening standing in for lard. The book gives no oven temperature or handling notes, so a few things need filling in.
- The hinge: let it coolThe instruction to cool the paste before rolling is the whole trick. Worked hot, the melted shortening makes the dough slack and greasy; rested until it firms to a putty, it rolls out cleanly and holds an edge.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, launched in 1911 and still sold, though reformulated to remove trans fats. Any modern solid vegetable shortening works; lard gives a crisper, more traditional hot-water crust.
- MeasuresFour tablespoonfuls of Crisco is 1/4 cup, about 2 oz. A cupful of flour in this period runs 4 to 4.5 oz, lighter than a modern scooped cup, so weigh if you can. A "basin" is simply a mixing bowl.
- The waterThree tablespoons of boiling water is a lean amount and will look insufficient at first. Stir it in fully before deciding; add a further teaspoon only if the flour will not gather into a mass.
- The baking powderA quarter teaspoon to a cupful of flour is a small amount, and the book gives no reason for it. Omitting it would give a firmer shell, closer to a raised or hand-held pie.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Modern practice for a shell of this type is a hot oven, around 425F, reduced once the pastry is set; a filled pie is generally started hot and finished moderate.
- Yield"Sufficient for one pie" is all the book says; the quantity suits a single crust for an 8- or 9-inch plate. Double it for a covered pie.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had reached the market only a few years earlier. That accounts for the shortening appearing by brand name in a recipe that would traditionally have called for lard: hot-water crust is an old British method, associated above all with raised pork pies, in which boiling fat and water are worked into flour to make a paste pliable enough to mould by hand and strong enough to stand without a tin. Crisco's makers pressed the point that a vegetable fat was cleaner-keeping than lard and, being neither meat nor dairy, acceptable in kitchens that kept kosher. This version is a domesticated, small-scale descendant of the butcher's raised crust, scaled to a single family pie and lightened with a pinch of baking powder.