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Aunty Phelps' Pie Crust
To one pint of sifted flour, add one even tea-spoon baking powder, and sweet cream enough to wet the flour, leaving crust a little stiff. This is enough for two pies.
A three-ingredient cream pastry that skips the usual cutting-in of fat entirely: the butterfat rides in with the liquid. The whole thing turns on the cream being cold and the dough being handled as little as possible.
- The hinge: keep it cold and barely mixedWith no solid fat to cut in, the fat arrives dispersed through the cream and works largely by coating the flour, so overworking is the main risk. Use cream straight from the refrigerator, stir only until the flour is damp, and press rather than knead it together.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz of all-purpose. Modern cups are packed heavier than a nineteenth-century scoop of sifted flour, so sift as directed or weigh to 8 oz.
- Sweet cream"Sweet" means fresh and unsoured, as opposed to soured cream. Heavy cream gives the richest result; a lighter cream will still bind the flour but yields a leaner, less tender crust.
- How much creamThe original leaves this to judgment. Expect roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup for 2 cups of flour, added a few tablespoons at a time until the dough just coheres and feels, as she says, a little stiff.
- Add saltThe recipe gives none. Half a teaspoon of salt whisked into the dry flour makes a noticeable difference.
- Baking powder in pastryAn even teaspoon lifts the dough slightly rather than making it rise; the effect is a softer, more biscuit-like crust than a lard or butter pastry. Check that your powder is double-acting and fresh, since single-acting powders of the period behaved differently.
- Yield"Enough for two pies" most likely means two single shells, or one double-crust pie; the recipe does not say what size. Divide the dough in two before rolling and chill any portion you are not working with.
- BakingNo temperature is given. For a filled pie, 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F to finish; for a blind-baked shell, dock it, weight it, and bake at 400F until dry and pale gold.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (Marysville, Ohio, 1877) was assembled from contributions by Methodist churchwomen across Ohio and beyond, which is why so many of its recipes carry a contributor's name — Aunty Phelps here — alongside the title. Cream pastry belongs to the dairy country the book came out of: where a household kept cows, cream was on hand and cost nothing extra, while purchased lard or butter did. Commercial baking powders became widely available in American groceries during the 1860s and 1870s, and cooks who had grown up on saleratus and sour milk were still experimenting with where the new leavening could be used, including places like pie crust where later cooks would leave it out.