Quick Pastry
1/4 Cupful Snowdrift. 1 Cupful Flour. 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt. 1/4 Teaspoonful Baking Powder. 3 Tablespoonfuls Boiling Water Sift together the dry ingredients and cut in the Snowdrift with a knife, keeping the mixture flaky. Then add the boiling water and cool the pastry before rolling.
This is one of the abbreviated entries typical of a manufacturer's cookbook, where the flour, salt and shortening quantities were assumed from the surrounding pages. As printed, the ingredient list is incomplete.
- The missing ingredientsOnly the 3 tablespoons of boiling water survive here; the dry ingredients and the amount of Snowdrift are not stated. Book-of-the-period pastry of this type runs about 2 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2/3 cup shortening to 3 tablespoons liquid, but that is a reconstruction from comparable recipes, not from this page.
- SnowdriftA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company; depending on the period of the book this would have been either a compound shortening or, later, a hydrogenated one. Any modern all-vegetable shortening stands in for it directly, by volume.
- Boiling water is the pointThe hot liquid partly melts and disperses the fat, which is why the method is fast and why the dough handles without tearing. It also means the fat must be cut in first and the water added last, exactly as written -- reversing the order gives you a paste rather than flakes.
- Do not skip the cooling"Cool the pastry before rolling" is the hinge of the recipe. Warm, softened shortening rolls out greasy and bakes dense; give the dough at least half an hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, until it is firm to the thumb.
- Cutting inStop while the fat is still in flattened pea-sized flakes. The instruction to keep the mixture flaky is doing real work: those sheets of fat are what separate the layers in the oven.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given on this page. For pastry of this kind a modern cook would use a hot oven, 425-450F, so the fat sets the layers before it can leak out. A blind-baked shell takes roughly 12-15 minutes with weights.
- YieldAt the proportions above, enough for one double-crust 9-inch pie or two single shells.
Snowdrift was a widely advertised cottonseed-oil shortening in the United States, and the cookbooks issued under its name existed to persuade cooks accustomed to lard and butter that a cottonseed-oil product would behave in pastry, cake and frying. Hot-water pastry was a favorite of such promotional books because it made the new shortening look forgiving: the boiling water emulsifies the fat, the dough tolerates handling, and a cook with no feel for cold-butter crust could still turn out something flaky. The compressed, ingredient-less form of this entry is a reminder that the brand name was expected to be the one constant on every page.