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Paste with Suet
Roll a half-pound of the best suet, with very little membrane running through it, on a board for several minutes, removing all the skin and fibers that appear when rolling; the suet will be a pure and sweet shortening, looking like butter; or the suet may be chopped fine and the fibers removed. Rub the suet into a pound of flour, add a tea-spoon salt, and mix it with a half pint of ice-water; roll out for the plates, and put on a little butter in flakes, rolling it in as usual. Some add a tea-spoon bakingpowder.
A suet-shortened pie paste from the era when beef fat was cheaper and more reliable than butter. The technique is sound, but suet behaves differently from the fats most cooks reach for now.
- Sourcing the suetFresh beef kidney suet is a butcher's item, not a supermarket one; order it ahead. Packaged shredded suet sold for puddings is usually dusted with flour or rice flour, so reduce the pound of flour slightly if you use it.
- Why the rollingWorking the suet on a board with a rolling pin is not creaming, it is a way to press out the connective membrane so the fat is uniform. Skip it and the crust bakes with tough, chewy threads through it. Chilling the suet hard first makes the skin and fiber easier to strip.
- The proportionsHalf a pound of fat to a pound of flour is the standard shortcrust proportion, firmer and less crumbly than a richer all-butter crust. Suet melts at a higher temperature than butter, so the paste stays workable longer.
- Half a pint of waterThat is a full US cup, which is generous for a pound of flour. Add about two-thirds of it, gather the dough, and hold the rest back; flour absorbency varies and a wet suet paste turns leathery.
- The butter in flakesDotting butter over the rolled sheet and folding it in is rough puff lamination. Keep the dough and the butter cold and give it two or three folds with a rest between, or the butter smears instead of forming layers.
- OvenThe recipe gives no baking direction at all. As a modern starting point only, a hot oven of about 425F to set the layers and then a drop to around 350F to finish the filling is one reasonable approach; the figures are not the book's.
- The baking powderA teaspoon lifts and lightens the paste slightly, giving something closer to a biscuit crust. The recipe leaves it optional ('Some add a tea-spoon bakingpowder'), so it is a matter of taste.
- YieldEnough for two double-crust 9-inch pies, or four single shells. The dough keeps a day or two wrapped in the refrigerator and freezes well.
Suet pastry belongs to the long stretch of Anglo-American cooking in which beef fat was one of several cheap alternatives to butter for anything that had to be economical. Butter was seasonal and expensive; suet was a byproduct of the beef and could be had cheaply. Buckeye Cookery (1877, from Marysville, Ohio) is thoroughly a book of that economy, and its pastry section offers several grades of paste for different purses and occasions. The insistence here on rolling the suet until it looks like butter reflects a real anxiety of the period: badly cleaned suet carried both membrane and a tallowy taste, and the difference between a good suet crust and a bad one lay almost entirely in that preparation. The flakes of butter rolled in at the end are the compromise, a little richness laid over a cheap foundation.