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Tip Top Pastry
1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 1/2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 2 1/4 cupfuls flour 1/2 cupful Crisco Cold water 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Sift and ix together flour, salt, and baking powder. Rub in Crisco with finger tips. Chill two hours. Then take out 1/2 cupful, and to remainder add lemon juice and cold water gradually to make stiff paste. Knead lightly and roll into long narrow strip. Sprinkle dough with half of reserved mixture and fold so as to make 3 layers. Turn half way round, roll again into strip, sprinkle with rest of mixture and fold as before. Roll and fold twice more, and pastry is ready for use for cakes, puddings, or pies.
Sufficient for two pies.
A rough puff pastry built around the then-new hydrogenated shortening. The method is sound, but the original leaves out the two numbers a modern cook wants most: how much water, and how hot the oven.
- Water is left to your judgmentThe recipe says only "cold water… gradually." For 2 1/4 cups flour expect somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 cup, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds. This is genuinely unspecified in the original, so go by feel rather than a fixed figure.
- The hinge: keep the reserved fat in flakesThe half cup of flour-and-shortening mixture set aside is what makes the pastry flaky. It must stay cold and crumbly when you sprinkle it between the folds; if it smears into the dough you get a short crust rather than a layered one.
- CriscoStill sold, and this book exists to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works; modern Crisco has been reformulated to reduce trans fat and behaves a little softer than the original, so chill it well. Lard or a half-butter blend will give more flavor and a firmer roll-out.
- Chill twice, not onceTwo hours before rolling is specified; the original does not say to rest between the folding turns, but modern practice is 20-30 minutes in the refrigerator whenever the dough starts to soften or the fat begins to show through.
- Lemon juiceThe teaspoon of acid is traditionally said to relax the gluten so the dough rolls out without fighting back; vinegar is used the same way. At this quantity it is not there for flavor and should be hard to taste.
- Baking powder in pastryUnusual now, and a period habit. It gives a slightly puffed, biscuit-like lift. Leaving it out produces a more conventional flaky pastry if that is what you want.
- No oven temperature givenPastry of this type wants a hot oven: 425F for a blind-baked shell, 20-25 minutes with a weighted lining, or 425F for the first 15 minutes of a filled pie dropped to 350F to finish.
- Yield"Sufficient for two pies" means two single crusts in 8- or 9-inch pans, or one double-crust pie.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of a string of cookbooks published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s and after to teach American cooks what to do with Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening the company introduced in 1911. The recipes call for it by name, which is why a pastry that would once have been made with lard or butter is here specified in Crisco down to the half cup. The technique itself is much older: repeatedly folding a fat-streaked dough into thirds is the rough-puff shortcut. Holding back part of the rubbed-in flour and fat to sprinkle between turns is often described as a compromise for cooks who wanted flakes without the labor of laminating a solid block of butter. The unstated water quantity and unstated oven heat are typical of the period, when a recipe assumed a reader who already knew what stiff paste felt like and how her own range behaved.