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Crust, Dripping, for Kitchen Pies
Rub six ounces of nicely-clarified beef dripping into a pound of flour. Add a pinch of salt, a small tea-spoonful of baking-powder, and a table-spoonful of sugar. Make the mixture into a stiff smooth paste by stirring cold water into it, and roll it out once only. It is then ready for use. Time to prepare, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 4d. per pound.
A plain suet-belt shortcrust built on beef dripping rather than butter, meant for everyday pies. It is a lean pastry by modern standards, and the handling instruction at the end is the part that matters.
- Roll out once onlyThe dough is not a laminated paste, and repeated rolling develops gluten and warms the fat, giving a tough crust. Bring it together, give it one roll to the thickness you want, and use it.
- Clarified drippingBeef dripping strained of meat juices and water; the clarifying matters because residual juices make the pastry catch and turn it rancid quickly. Butchers and some supermarkets still sell it in tubs. Lard behaves almost identically here; butter will taste better but is softer and needs colder water and a firmer hand.
- The fat ratio is lowSix ounces of fat to a pound of flour is about 37 per cent, well under the 50 per cent of a standard shortcrust. Expect a firm, biscuity crust rather than a crumbly one, which is the point for a pie that has to hold gravy.
- Baking powder in pastryNot a mistake: the recipe genuinely calls for a small teaspoonful. A little lift keeps a plain crust from sitting heavy over a deep dish of meat or fruit. Use the same small teaspoonful, level, and no more.
- Water quantityNone is given. Reckon on roughly 6 to 8 tablespoons of cold water for a pound of flour, added a little at a time; the paste should be stiff, not tacky.
- Ounces here are avoirdupoisOne pound of flour is about 3 1/2 cups, six ounces of dripping about 3/4 cup. Weighing is far more reliable for pastry than cup measures.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction, being for the paste alone. Modern practice for a covered meat or fruit pie would be a hot oven, around 425F, for the first 15 to 20 minutes to set and colour the pastry, then about 350F to finish; the original text supports none of this.
- YieldFlour and fat alone come to 1 lb 6 oz; with the added water, reckon on about 1 lb 10 oz of paste, enough to cover two 9-inch pie dishes generously, or to line and lid one deep dish.
The name is the useful part: a kitchen pie is generally taken to be the plainer one, as against the dining-room pie that got puff paste made with butter, though the sense of the word here is inference rather than documented fact. Cassell's, writing for late-Victorian middle-class households that kept one or two servants, gives both, and quotes the price so a mistress could check the kitchen books, 4d. a pound being genuinely cheap even then. Dripping was the by-product of every roast joint, poured off, clarified and kept in a crock. The habit faded in Britain as bought vegetable shortenings became universal and roasting large joints at home became rarer.