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Crust, Short, Common
Mix two table-spoonfuls of sifted sugar, a pinch of salt, and a heaped tea-spoonful of baking-powder with one pound of dry flour. Rub into it three ounces of good beef dripping, and work it into a smooth paste with water or new milk. Handle it as little as possible. Bake in a moderate oven. Probable cost, 4d. per pound.
A very lean, chemically raised pastry meant for everyday pies rather than company ones. The proportions look wrong to a modern eye and are worth understanding before you commit a pound of flour.
- The fat is unusually lowThree ounces of fat to sixteen ounces of flour is well under half what a modern shortcrust uses, which typically runs to 8 oz of fat per pound of flour. The result is closer to a soft scone dough than to a crisp short paste: fine as a pie lid or a lining for a substantial filling, disappointing as a tart shell eaten on its own. If you want a genuinely short crust, expect to raise the dripping to 6-8 oz.
- Beef drippingThe rendered fat from roast beef, sold in tubs in Britain and available from butchers elsewhere. It is firm at room temperature and carries a distinct savoury flavour, so this crust suits meat pies and hearty fruit pies better than delicate ones. Lard behaves nearly identically; butter will work but is softer, so chill the dough before rolling.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F/180-190C. For a pie lid that needs colour and lift from the baking powder, the upper end of that range or a little above is the better bet; at 350F this dough tends to set pale.
- Sifted sugar and new milkSifted sugar means sugar pounded or broken down and passed through a sieve; caster or superfine sugar is the nearest modern equivalent. New milk is simply fresh whole milk, unskimmed and unsoured; the milk version will brown a little more than the water version.
- Baking powder in a pastryThe heaped teaspoon is there to give lift and tenderness that the small quantity of fat cannot. It also means the dough is best mixed when you intend to bake, since some of the leavening is lost if it stands overnight.
- Handle it as little as possibleThe hinge of the recipe. With this little fat there is nothing to stop the flour developing gluten, so a kneaded dough goes tough and leathery. Bring it together with a knife or fingertips until it just coheres, roll once, and stop.
- Water quantityNone is given, and none can be given reliably, since flours differ in absorption. Start with about 5 fl oz for the pound and add a spoonful at a time until the dough holds together without tackiness.
- YieldAbout 1 lb 8 oz of pastry: enough to line and lid one deep 9-inch pie, or to cover two shallower ones. Halve the recipe for a single family pie.
Cassell's separates its pastry entries by expense as much as by method, and this one is the household default: no butter, no eggs, dripping saved from the Sunday joint, and the cost noted at fourpence a pound so a cook could weigh it against the alternatives. Beef dripping was a byproduct every meat-eating kitchen produced, so the pastry effectively cost the price of the flour. The heaped teaspoon of baking powder is consistent with a late Victorian date, though that is an inference from the book's own date rather than from the recipe itself: commercial baking powders were available in Britain from the 1840s, with cheapness and general use coming later in the century. What the recipe records, in other words, is not a technique anyone aspired to but the everyday crust that went over meat scraps and stewed fruit on the other six days of the week.