Puff Pastry
1 teaspoonful salt 1 cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour 1 yolk of egg 2 teaspoonfuls lemon juice Cold water Measure Crisco and set in cold place to chill it. sift flour and salt into basin, and add lemon juice. Take a quarter of the Crisco, and rub it lightly into flour with finger tips until there are no lumps left. Beat yolk of egg and add a little cold water, then add them to the flour, making them into a stiffish dough. Turn this on to floured board, and work well with hands until it will no longer stick to fingers and forms a perfectly smooth dough. Form into oblong piece and roll out to about half inch thickness. The Crisco to be used should be as nearly as possible of same consistency as the paste. Form it into neat flat cake, and place in center of pastry. Fold up rather loosely, and flat the folds with rolling-pin. Place in refrigerator for ten minutes. Then roll out pastry into long narrow strip, being careful that Crisco does not get through. Fold exactly in three, press down folds, and lay aside in cool place or in refrigerator fifteen minutes. This is called giving the pastry one "turn" and seven of these is the number required for this pastry. The next time the pastry is rolled, place it with the joins at your right had side, and open ends towards you. Give two "turns' this time, and again set aside in cool place for at least fifteen minutes. Repeat this until pastry has had seven rolls in all. The object of the cooling between the rolls is to keep Crisco and flour in distinct and separate layers, in which it is the function of the rolling-pin and folding to arrange them, and on which the lightness of the pastry depends.
When rolling, keep the pressure of the two hands as equal as possible. If the pastry becomes rounded, it shows that there is more pressure being done on the rounded side than the other. After it has received its last roll, it is better to be laid aside before using, then rolled to the thickness required. Sufficient for two pies.
A classic laminated dough written for the shortening tin rather than the butter block. The method is sound; a few of its assumptions need translating.
- Cold is the whole recipeThe lightness comes from keeping fat and dough as separate layers, which only happens if the fat stays firm. If the shortening begins to smear or break through the dough, stop and chill it for twenty minutes rather than pressing on.
- Crisco, then and nowCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and at the time this book was written it was a new product being actively promoted. It is still sold, though reformulated over the years to reduce trans fats. Unsalted butter or a dedicated pastry butter will give better flavour and a crisper lift, but it is softer at room temperature and demands stricter chilling.
- "Basin"British usage for a mixing bowl. One cup of shortening is about 7 oz / 200 g; two cups of flour about 9 oz / 250 g.
- The lemon juiceA small quantity of acid is traditionally added to relax the gluten so the dough will take repeated rolling without fighting back; the effect at two teaspoons is modest, and it is not there for flavour.
- Seven turnsNote the counting: one turn first, then pairs, for seven single folds in all. That is more than most modern recipes, which stop at six, and it is easy to lose track. Press a fingertip dimple into the dough for each completed turn.
- Resting times are minimumsTen and fifteen minutes assume a cold larder and a cold room. In a warm kitchen give it 30 minutes in the refrigerator between turns, and rest the finished block at least an hour before the final rolling.
- Oven temperature, which the recipe never givesPuff pastry needs high initial heat to turn the water in the dough to steam: 425F for the first 15 minutes, then drop to 375F to dry the layers through. A slow oven melts the fat out before the layers can rise.
- Yield"Sufficient for two pies." The recipe does not say what size, nor whether these are single or double crusts. The dough freezes well after the last turn; wrap tightly and thaw in the refrigerator.
This is a Crisco cookbook. A Calendar of Dinners came out of the promotional recipe-book campaign that Procter & Gamble mounted for its new all-vegetable shortening in the years after 1911, written by Marion Harris Neil, a working cookery writer whose name appears on several of these volumes. The inclusion of a full seven-turn puff pastry, the most demanding thing in the classical pastry repertoire, can plausibly be read as an argument that the new fat could do everything butter and lard could do; it may be why the instructions dwell so carefully on getting the shortening to the same consistency as the paste. The technique itself is much older, the French pâte feuilletée, traditionally credited to the painter Claude Gellée and just as traditionally undocumented.