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Rough Puff Pastry
2 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco, generous measure 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 1 egg Cold water Have Crisco cold and firm. Sift flour and salt into basin, add Crisco and cut into pieces one inch square. Beat up egg, add lemon juice and a very little cold water, then add them gradually into other ingredients making them into a stiff paste. Roll in a long piece on floured board, fold in three, turn rough edges toward you and roll out again, continuing this for five times. Place in refrigerator or in cool place ten minutes between each rolling. This pastry may be used at once for all kinds of sweet or savory pies, but it is improved by standing for a few hours in a cool place. Bake in hot oven. Sufficient for two covered pies.
A quick laminated pastry from a Crisco-sponsored cookbook, built on visible cubes of cold fat rather than a butter block. It behaves well if the fat stays firm and the dough stays cold.
- The hinge: keep the fat in piecesThe one-inch cubes are the whole method — they flatten into sheets between layers of dough during the rolling and turning, and that is what makes the pastry rise. If the fat smears or softens into the flour, you get shortcrust instead. Stop and chill the moment the dough feels slack or greasy.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 425–450°F. Rough puff needs high heat so the water in the dough turns to steam and lifts the layers before the fat melts out; a moderate oven gives a flat, soaked crust.
- Crisco is not what it wasThe 1910s product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil and was firmer than today's reformulated shortening, which is softer at room temperature. Chill it hard, cube it while cold, and work fast -- or use the same amount of cold unsalted butter.
- "Basin"Simply a mixing bowl. British usage.
- Cold water is unmeasured for a reasonThe book gives no quantity because flour absorbency varies. With one beaten egg already in, expect somewhere around 2 to 4 tablespoons — add it a spoonful at a time and stop at a stiff, slightly rough dough, not a smooth one.
- Lemon juiceThe acid is generally held to relax the gluten so the dough will roll out over five turns without fighting back, and white vinegar is used the same way. It is not there for flavor and will not be tasted.
- Five turns and the restsTen minutes in the refrigerator between rollings is the minimum; twenty is better in a warm kitchen, and the dough is genuinely improved by the few hours' rest the recipe suggests. Turn the folded dough so the open edges face you before rolling, as the recipe directs.
- YieldRoughly a pound of pastry, which the book reckons sufficient for two covered pies. It freezes well, wrapped.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the branded cookbook, published by a manufacturer to teach cooks how to use a new product. Crisco appeared in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, and Procter & Gamble's problem was that American kitchens already had lard and butter and saw no reason to change. The answer was recipe books in which every formula, sweet or savory, called for Crisco by name — including pastry, the hardest sell of all, since bakers were attached to lard for flakiness. Rough puff itself is a humbler, later simplification of true puff paste: instead of enclosing a block of butter in dough and building hundreds of layers, the fat is simply cut in as lumps and the layering happens incidentally during the rolls and folds. It is generally regarded as the domestic cook's shortcut to the pâtissier's pâte feuilletée, well suited to the period fondness for small filled savories served at tea and luncheon.