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Crust, Lard
Rub half a pound of lard into a pound of flour, add a pinch of salt, and make it into a paste by mixing with it a cupful of water. The unmelted lard, freed from skin and thinly sliced, makes very good pastry; but a mixture of lard and dripping, or lard and butter, makes a better crust than lard alone. Time to prepare, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
A plain half-fat shortcrust in the old British proportion of two parts flour to one part fat. The recipe assumes you know what to do with it once made, so a few of the missing details are supplied below.
- The water is the thing to watchA cupful of water is far more than a pound of flour needs for shortcrust, and the size of a Victorian "cupful" was not standardised in any case. Modern shortcrust recipes use only a few tablespoons for this quantity of flour. Add it a spoonful at a time, stop the moment the dough coheres, and expect to leave a good deal in the cup.
- Weights and yield1 lb flour is about 3½ cups; ½ lb lard is 1 cup or two American sticks' worth. The flour and fat alone come to 1½ lb, and the finished paste rather more once water is added — enough for a double-crust 9-inch pie with trimmings.
- Keep everything coldLard is softer and more plastic at room temperature than butter, so chill it hard and use ice water. Rubbing in should leave pea-sized flakes rather than an even sand if you want any flakiness.
- "Unmelted lard, freed from skin"This means fresh pork fat that has not been rendered — leaf or flare fat, with the membrane stripped off and the fat sliced thin. Rendered leaf lard from a butcher is the nearest modern substitute; commercial block lard is more heavily processed and many cooks find it gives a less good crust.
- DrippingThe dripping meant here would most often be beef dripping saved from the roasting tin, which contributes savoury flavour and firmness; the recipe does not specify. It suits meat pies; for fruit pies the lard-and-butter mixture is the better choice.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsThe original gives no oven instruction. By modern practice a lard crust wants a hot start, around 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the pastry, then about 375F until coloured through, with the dough rested at least 30 minutes in the refrigerator before rolling. None of this is in the text.
- "Probable cost, 10d. per pound"Ten pence in pre-decimal British currency, a figure Cassell's gives throughout to help a housekeeper price a dish. It is a period market note, not a conversion you can use.
Lard was the everyday pastry fat of British and American kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheaper than butter and, because it is nearly pure fat with large soft crystals, unusually good at producing a short, tender crust. Cassell's, an alphabetical dictionary, files the entry under "Crust," reflecting an expectation that a household would choose its crust by purpose and purse: lard for meat pies and everyday work, butter reserved for finer baking. The note on "unmelted lard, freed from skin" belongs to a time when a cook might buy raw pork fat and use or render it herself rather than buy it in a block, and the recommendation to blend lard with dripping or butter reflects what seems to have been a common compromise or beef fat for flavour. The decline of lard crusts, generally traced to the interwar decades, is often said to have owed much to the marketing of vegetable shortenings rather than to any fault in the pastry.