Home › Food for the Sick › OAT-MEAL PIE-CRUST
OAT-MEAL PIE-CRUST
This is made exactly like the dough for crackers; it may be rolled a very little thinner. It bakes quickly, so that care must be taken not to scorch it in cooking the contents of the pie. It is not suited for an upper crust, but does admirably for pies that require but one crust. It is just the thing for those who do not think shortened pie-crusts wholesome, and it is good enough for any one. One can cat it with as much impunity as so much oat-meal mush and fruit sauce.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone recipe: the dough is the book's oatmeal cracker dough, which is essentially oatmeal, salt and water worked into a stiff paste with no fat at all. That absence of shortening governs everything about how it behaves.
- No quantities are given hereThe entry deliberately points back to the cracker dough elsewhere in the book, so there is nothing to scale on this page. Any workable version runs to roughly rolled oats ground fine or oat flour, a good pinch of salt, and just enough cold water to make a stiff, barely tacky paste.
- The oatmeal of 1880The oatmeal of the period -- Oatmeal in the 1870s and 1880s generally meant steel-cut or coarsely ground groats rather than the thin rolled flakes sold today, though rolled oats were coming onto the market in these very years. Whole flakes will tear the sheet as you roll; grind them to a meal in a food processor first, or use oat flour with a little coarse oatmeal for texture.
- RollingWith no fat to bind it, the dough has little cohesion and will crack at the edges. Roll it between two sheets of parchment or waxed paper, patch tears by pressing rather than re-rolling, and transfer it to the pan on the paper.
- The scorching warning is the hingeAn unshortened oat crust tends to colour faster than a lard or butter pastry and may darken before the filling has set, which is what the author's warning is about. Shield the rim with foil and check it at half the filling's stated time.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is given; the text says only that the crust 'bakes quickly'. For a filled single-crust pie, 350-375F suits, since the crust must take the filling's baking time rather than its own.
- Single crust only, and whyThe author is right that it will not do as a lid. Without fat it never becomes flaky, and steam from below turns an upper sheet leathery. Use it for custards, pumpkin, fruit butters and other one-crust fillings.
- What to expect from itExpect something closer to a pressed oat biscuit base than to pastry: firm and nutty, and probably best eaten the day it is baked, since an unshortened crust will soften under a wet filling.
This crust belongs squarely to the nineteenth-century American health-reform tradition, though the specific book, edition and chapter placement cannot be confirmed from the page itself. Health reformers, following Sylvester Graham and the water-cure and hygienic writers who came after him, held that fat baked into flour, especially lard, was slow to digest and unsuitable for invalids; "shortened pie-crust" was a standing example of the indigestible rich food a sickroom diet was meant to exclude. Oatmeal, by contrast, carried the double prestige of Scottish plainness and medical approval, and oatmeal gruel and mush were standard invalid fare on both sides of the Atlantic. The author's closing line, that it can be eaten "with as much impunity as so much oat-meal mush and fruit sauce," is making exactly that argument: this is not pastry pretending to be wholesome but mush in a portable shape. The faintly defensive "it is good enough for any one" suggests that sickroom cookery had a reputation to overcome even among the people writing it.