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PASTE, SHORT, FOR TARTS AND FRUIT PIES (another way) (Mix a small tea-spoonful)
Mix a small tea-spoonful of salt with a pound of dried flour. Rub in four ounces of butter and four ounces of lard or good beef dripping. Add a tea-spoonful of baking powder, and a table-spoonful of powdered sugar. Make the whole into a stiff paste by stirring in a little water, roll it out lightly once only, and it is ready for use. Time, ten minutes to prepare. Probable cost, 9d.
A plain English shortcrust, half butter and half lard, lifted slightly with baking powder and sweetened just enough for fruit. The whole thing turns on the single roll-out the recipe insists on.
- Quantities in metric and cupsA pound of flour is about 450 g, roughly 3½ cups; 4 oz each of butter and lard is 115 g each. That is a fat-to-flour ratio of 1:2, standard for a pastry meant to hold juicy fruit rather than shatter.
- "Dried flour"Victorian flour was stored in a bin and often warmed by the fire or in a cool oven to drive off damp before use. Modern bagged plain (all-purpose) flour needs no such treatment; use it straight.
- Beef drippingStill sold in Britain and worth using if you have it, for a savoury depth lard does not give. It behaves like lard in the rub-in stage. Vegetable shortening substitutes for either, though the flavour is flatter.
- Roll out once onlyThis is the hinge. Repeated rolling develops gluten and works the fat into the flour, giving a tough, greyish crust. Bring the dough together with as little handling as possible, chill it 20-30 minutes, then roll in one pass to the thickness you want.
- The water"A little water" is roughly 6-8 tablespoons for this quantity, but flours vary. Add it a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed; ice-cold water keeps the fat solid.
- Baking powder in pastryA less common addition, and deliberate: it gives a slightly puffed, biscuity crust rather than a flaky one. A level teaspoon is plenty.
- OvenThe recipe gives none. Fruit pies with this paste want 400-425F (200-220C) for the first 20 minutes to set and colour the crust, then 350F (180C) until the fruit is tender.
- YieldEnough for one, at most two, double-crust pies of about 9 inches, or four to six tart cases. The dough keeps a few days wrapped in the fridge and freezes well.
Cassell's gives several short pastes in succession, each pitched at a different purse, and this one sits in the middle: half butter for flavour, half lard or dripping for economy and shortness. The costing of ninepence a pound-batch is the point of the entry as much as the method — Cassell's readership is usually described as mistresses of modest households instructing a single servant, and the dictionary priced almost everything so the week's accounts could be checked. Dripping, the fat rendered from a roast joint and saved in a basin, was a genuine free ingredient in a meat-eating household and appears throughout the book as a legitimate alternative to bought lard. The teaspoonful of baking powder marks the recipe as later nineteenth century: commercial baking powders became widely available in Britain from the 1840s onward, and it is often said that cooks began adding them to pastry as well as cake, producing a softer, slightly risen crust.