Home › Dessert › Pot-Pie Crust
Pot-Pie Crust
One quart flour, a little salt, two teaspoons baking powder, one piece butter or lard size of an egg; wet it with milk or water and have it about as stiff as biscuits, cut it in small pieces and place in the steamer; after having first buttered the steamer to prevent their sticking, steam from twenty minutes to half an hour, then place them around the chicken or meat on the platter.
This is a steamed dumpling dough meant to be served around a boiled chicken or a pot of stewed meat, not a rolled pastry lid. The proportions are workable as written, though the leavening reads light by modern habit.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, a quart is 4 cups, roughly 17-18 oz of all-purpose flour. That is a large batch by modern standards.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Cut it into the dry flour as you would for biscuits rather than melting it.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to 4 cups of flour is light; current practice is closer to a teaspoon per cup. Also note that baking powder of this period was often single-acting, so the dough was meant to go into the steamer promptly. Do not let it stand.
- Stiff as biscuitsThe milk or water is unmeasured on purpose. Add it until the dough just holds together and is barely sticky, likely 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups. Handle it as little as possible; worked dough steams heavy.
- The hinge: keep the lid shutSteam dumplings rise from the burst of heat and hold their shape only if the steam is uninterrupted. Lifting the lid to check drops the temperature and gives you dense, gummy centers. Leave it alone for the full twenty minutes.
- Room in the steamerCut the pieces small, as directed, and leave space between them. They swell considerably and will fuse into one mass if crowded.
- Steamed, not boiledMany pot-pie recipes drop the dough straight into the gravy. Steaming separately keeps the broth clear and unthickened, since none of the flour washes off into it. Worth knowing if you want a sauce rather than a stew.
American pot pie of the nineteenth century was usually a stewed dish rather than a baked one: chicken or beef simmered in a pot with squares of dough added toward the end, a form still called bot boi in Pennsylvania German kitchens, where the dough is cut in flat noodle-like squares. This version departs from that by steaming the dough apart from the meat and arranging it on the platter, which produces something closer to a biscuit dumpling and keeps the broth thin. The recipe belongs firmly to the chemical-leavening era; commercial baking powder became a pantry staple in American households after the 1860s, though cooks had already had quicker chemical leavening in saleratus and pearlash, and yeast sponges and hand-beaten air were never the only alternatives. Recipes of this vintage habitually measure flour by the quart and fat by comparison to an egg, a shorthand that assumed a cook who already knew what the dough should feel like.