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Good Common Paste
One coffee-cup lard, three of sifted flour, and a little salt. In winter soften the lard a little (but not in summer), cut it well into the flour with a knife, then mix with cold water quickly into a moderately stiff dough, handling as little as possible. This makes four common-sized covered pies. Take a new slice of paste each time for top crust. After rolling spread with a tea-spoon, butter, fold and roll again, using the trimmings, etc., for under crust.- Miss Katy Rupp.
A plain lard pastry with a single butter fold, meant to be mixed fast and handled as little as possible. The proportions are given by volume, which is where most of the ambiguity lies.
- The coffee-cupCup measures of the period were not standardized; a coffee-cup is often read as about a standard cup, though some books reckon it larger. Taken as 1 cup lard to 3 cups flour, that is roughly 7-8 oz lard to 13 oz flour, a rich paste with more than half as much fat as flour by weight.
- Water is unmeasuredNo quantity is given because it depends on the flour. Expect 6 to 8 tablespoons of ice water, added a spoonful at a time only until the dough coheres when pressed.
- The hinge: handle it as little as possibleThe instruction is repeated for good reason. Cutting the lard in with a knife rather than rubbing it in with warm hands leaves visible flakes of fat, and those flakes are the flakiness. Stop mixing while the dough still looks shaggy.
- Lard has changedNineteenth-century lard was rendered leaf or back fat, soft and plastic. Supermarket lard is usually hydrogenated and firmer, with a faint cured smell. Rendered leaf lard from a butcher gives the intended texture; if using the shelf-stable kind, skip the winter softening step.
- "A new slice of paste each time"Divide the dough and cut a fresh, unworked portion for each top crust; the trimmings, which have already been squeezed and rerolled, go underneath where toughness matters less.
- The butter foldSpreading a teaspoon of butter over the rolled sheet, folding and rolling again is a single-turn rough puff. Do it once, chill the dough if the butter starts to smear, and do not knead the fold flat.
- OvenNo temperature is given, as usual for the period. Fruit pies in a lard crust are conventionally started hot, around 425F, for 15 minutes to set the pastry, then finished at 350F until the filling bubbles.
- YieldFour "common-sized" covered pies. The recipe does not say what size that was, and 3 cups of flour spread over four two-crust pies implies thinner crusts or smaller tins than a modern 9-inch double-crust pie, which on its own takes 2 to 2 1/2 cups of flour. Expect considerably fewer than four pies at modern sizes.
Lard was the default American pie fat well into the twentieth century, and a book like Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping — compiled in Marysville, Ohio, in 1877 from contributions by named local women, Miss Katy Rupp among them — seems to address a household that rendered its own each autumn after the hog was killed. "Paste" is the older English word for pastry dough, surviving here long after "pie crust" had begun to replace it, and the distinction between a "good common paste" and the richer puff pastes elsewhere in the section plausibly has more to do with economy than skill: common paste used lard, puff paste used butter, and butter, one imagines, could be sold. The single teaspoon of butter folded in looks like a compromise, buying a little lamination and a little flavor at almost no cost.