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Pastry, Good Plain
Mix a tea-spoonful of salt with a pound of flour. Rub in a quarter of a pound of rather soft lard or dripping, until the ingredients are thoroughly blended, then add two tea-spoonfuls of baking-powder. Draw the mixture to one side of the bowl, pour a little water into the vacant space, and with the fingers work the ingredients to a soft paste. Lift the pastry out in small quantities as it acquires the proper consistency. Roll it out till sufficiently firm to incorporate another four ounces of lard with it, dredge a little flour on it, give it one or two turns, and it is ready for use. This pastry requires a quick oven. Time, ten minutes to make. Probable cost, 6d.
A rough-puff shortcrust from a period when pastry was reckoned by the pound of flour and the fat was whatever the kitchen had rendered that week. The method is sound; only the vocabulary and the oven need translating.
- The hinge: two stages of fatOnly half the fat (4 oz) is rubbed in; the second 4 oz goes in as flakes during rolling, which is what gives the flakiness. Skipping the second addition leaves you with a plain short crust, not this.
- "A quick oven"Conventionally read as roughly 425-450F (220-230C), though Victorian oven descriptions were approximate and varied between books. Pastry with this much fat needs the initial blast to set the layers before the lard melts and runs out; a cooler oven tends to give a greasy, sunken crust.
- Quantities in modern terms1 lb flour is about 3½ cups; 8 oz total fat is one cup. The water is deliberately unmeasured — expect roughly 5 to 7 fl oz of cold water, added gradually, depending on your flour.
- "Rather soft lard or dripping"Dripping is the strained fat from roast beef or pork, still sold in Britain and easily saved at home; it carries a savoury note better suited to meat pies than to fruit. Lard or a firm shortening substitutes directly. "Rather soft" means pliable but not oily — refrigerated lard left out twenty minutes.
- The baking powderUnusual in modern pastry, and it is doing real work here: this is an economical crust with less fat than puff paste, and the powder compensates for the lift the missing layers would have given. Two teaspoons to a pound of flour is about right for today's double-acting powder as well.
- "One or two turns"A turn is a fold in three (like a letter) followed by a quarter rotation of the dough before the next roll. The recipe leaves the choice at one or two and allows no resting between them.
- Time and resting"Ten minutes to make" refers to the making only, not the baking. The dough benefits from 20-30 minutes chilled before it is rolled to fit a dish.
- YieldA pound of flour makes enough for two 9-inch single-crust pies, or one generous double-crust. "Probable cost, 6d" was sixpence — the book quoted prices so a housekeeper could budget the week.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a fat single-volume reference of the late Victorian and Edwardian household, sorted its contents alphabetically. "Good plain pastry" is no mere modesty — half the fat of a true puff paste, worked with a couple of turns instead of six or seven, and propped up with baking powder, which had become cheap and reliable in British kitchens only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The instruction to use dripping is the tell: nothing was rendered and then wasted, and the fat from Sunday's joint reappeared in Tuesday's pie crust. The odd business of drawing the flour to one side of the bowl, pouring water into the cleared space, and lifting out the dough in handfuls as it comes together is a hand-mixing technique for keeping the whole mass from being overworked at once, and it works as well now as it did then.