Flaky Pastry
1 Cupful Flour 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt 5 Tablespoonfuls Snowdrift 1/4 Cupful Cold Water 1 Cupful Flour 1/4 Cupful Snowdrift 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt ¼ Teaspoonful Baking Powder Sift together the flour and salt and work in half of the Snowdrift with a spoon or knife, keeping the mixture coarse and flaky. Cautiously stir in three and a half tablespoonfuls of the cold water. If at this point, the mixture becomes sufficiently moist, omit the last half tablespoonful of water. Turn onto a slightly floured board, dust with flour, and roll out the mixture into rectangular shape.
Spread the remaining Snowdrift on this to within an inch of the edge. Fold over the dough, pressing the edges together, and gently roll into a round, thin sheet.
Repeat this three times in order to make the pastry flaky in layers, when it is baked. Then use as directed. This amount will make one medium-sized pie with two crusts, or one large pie with a built-up crust.
A rough puff worked with shortening rather than butter, from a promotional cookbook for Snowdrift brand fat. The printed text carries two overlapping ingredient lists, so read the method rather than the top block.
- The duplicated ingredient listThe page shows two sets of quantities, almost certainly two variants of the same formula set in type one after the other. The method that follows uses the first set: 1 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 5 tablespoons shortening (half worked in, half spread on), and up to 1/4 cup cold water. The second set, with 1/4 cup shortening and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder (printed as "14"), is an alternative; do not combine them.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold from around the turn of the twentieth century; later formulations were hydrogenated. Any modern vegetable shortening substitutes measure for measure; butter will work but is softer and will need the dough chilled between folds.
- The hinge: keep everything cold and coarseThe flakiness comes entirely from discrete sheets of fat surviving the rolling. Work the first portion of fat in only until it looks like coarse crumbs, and stop adding water the moment the dough coheres. Overworked or warm dough gives a uniform, mealy crust instead of layers.
- "Repeat this three times"The wording is ambiguous: it may mean three further rounds of folding and rolling, or three in all. If the fat begins to smear or the dough springs back, refrigerate 20 minutes before continuing, an option the original does not mention.
- Water quantityThree and a half tablespoons is the working amount, with the final half tablespoon held in reserve. Modern flours vary in absorption; err toward the smaller amount and add drops rather than a full spoonful.
- No oven temperature givenThe recipe defers to whatever pie it is used for. Laminated pastry of this type is generally started hot in modern practice, around 425F, so the trapped fat steams the layers apart before it melts out.
- YieldOne medium-sized double-crust pie, or one larger pie with a built-up crust, as the recipe states. For a modern 9-inch double crust you may want one and a half times the quantity.
Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening from the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and this book, like Crisco's contemporaries, exists to persuade cooks that a manufactured vegetable fat could replace lard and butter in everything from pie crust to cake. Hence the insistence here that the product will laminate: flaky pastry was the classic proof of a good fat, and the recipe is really an argument in dough form. The technique itself is a simplified rough puff, a shortcut on the folded pastries of French practice, and the choice to spread rather than dot the second portion of fat is what distinguishes it from the plain cut-in American pie crust printed on the same kind of page a generation earlier. Cottonseed oil was abundant and cheap as a byproduct of the cotton crop, which is why so many early twentieth-century American shortenings trace back to the South.