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Flour Mixtures Continued: Pastry and Pies
MEN, as a rule, are fond of pastry, especially when it takes the form of a pie. Thus a young housekeeper - at least after a time - will be desirous of knowing how to make a pie. Pastry is made of flour, fat, salt and just enough water to hold the ingredients together in rolling out. Fat makes pastry tender, water toughens it; thus fat rather than water should pre-dominate in the mixture. Pastry flour, which takes up but a small quantity of water, should always be used in this branch of cookery.
For puff-paste the weight in butter equals that of the flour called for, but for ordinary paste fat equal in weight to half the weight of the flour will make good pastry. Lard gives a softer crust than does butter, cottolene or suet; but butter is thought to produce the best tasting pastry. Butter, particularly in winter, is not very pliable, and, in the end, time is saved, if the butter be washed in cold water before it is added to the flour. Pastry is lightened by the expansion of the air enclosed during the making. A little baking powder, one-fourth a teaspoonful to a cup of flour, insures the lightness that an inexperienced cook sometimes fails to secure. WHY PASTRY IS THOUGHT UNHEALTHFUL No one of the ingredients in pastry is unwholesome, and fat is absolutely necessary to perfect nutrition; but fat with other food-principles in an artificial combination has often proved unhygienic. To be properly digested, starch must be mixed with the digestive fluids of the mouth, but these fluids have no effect upon fat and, unless the mastication be very much prolonged, the starch surrounded by fat will pass on unchanged to the stomach. Then, if pastry be made, let it be tender, friable and well cooked; and let it be masticated thoroughly.
PASTRY FOR ONE PIE 1 1/4 cups of sifted pastry flour 1/4 teaspoonful of baking pow- (5 ounces) der, if desired 1/4 teaspoonful of salt (gener- 1/3 cup (2 to 3 ounces) of ous measure) shortening, and cold water Sift together the flour, salt and baking power; with a knife or the tips of the fingers work the shortening into the flour mixture, then adding cold water, a few drops at atime, with a knife stire the mixture to a paste. Add no more water than is needed to form the ingredinets into a stiff paste. This paste is now ready for use.
FLAKY PASTRY FOR ONE PIE 1 1/4 cups of sifted pastry flour 1/4 teaspoonful of salt (gener- (5 ounces) ous measure) 1/4 teaspoonful of baking pow- 1/4 cup of shortening (lard or cottolene) Cold water 2 tablespoonfuls of butter Scald an earthen bowl and a wooden spoon, then chill them thoroughly; add cold water to the bowl and in it wash the butter, pressing it with the spoon; when the butter may be gathered into a pliable, waxy mass, remove to a cloth, pat a little, to remove the water, then set aside in a cool place until the paste is ready. Use the lard with the other ingredients in making the paste as given above.
Turn the paste onto a board lightly dredged with flour; turn it in the flour, then pat it lightly with the rolling pin and roll into a square sheet; with a knife cut off bits of the prepared butter and press them lightly on the paste until all is used. Set the pieces of butter on the paste so as to distribute them evenly over the paste. Fold the paste to make three layers; pat with the rolling pin gently, then roll into a sheet; roll up the paste like a jelly roll, and it is ready to use; or it may be covered closely (to keep the outside from drying) and set aside in a cool place until the next day. Often pastry may be handled more easily after it has been left in a cool place some hours or over night.
Two workable single-crust pastries, one plain and one rough-laminated. The measurements are given by weight as well as volume, which makes them easier to follow than most recipes of this vintage.
- The hinge: water, not fat, is the enemyAdd cold water a few drops at a time and stop the moment the paste holds together when pressed. Every extra spoonful develops gluten, and this dough has no room for it.
- Pastry flourRoughly 8 to 9 percent protein, softer than modern all-purpose. Substitute by replacing 2 tablespoons of each cup of all-purpose flour with cornstarch, or use a low-protein Southern-style flour. The 5-ounce (140 g) weight the book gives for 1 1/4 cups is its own equivalence, close enough to modern weights to be worth using.
- CottoleneA brand of cottonseed-oil shortening, blended with beef suet, gone for decades; it predates hydrogenated shortening. Any modern vegetable shortening stands in for it, or lard, which the recipe also allows.
- Washing the butterThis was done to work out excess water and buttermilk from irregular dairy butter and to make it pliable without warming it. Modern butter is standardised at about 80 percent fat, so the step can be skipped; simply keep the butter cold and slice it thin over the rolled sheet.
- Shortening quantity"1/3 cup (2 to 3 ounces)" is a wide range. Weigh it: 2 1/2 ounces (70 g) against 5 ounces of flour gives the half-the-weight-of-flour ratio the headnote recommends.
- Baking, which the recipe never mentionsNo oven temperature is given because none of the fillings are here. Blind-bake a shell at 425F until set and lightly coloured; a filled fruit pie is generally started at 425F and finished lower. Chill the shaped crust before it goes in the oven.
- YieldEnough for a single crust; the recipe says only 'pastry for one pie' and gives no diameter. Double it for a double-crust pie.
- The digestion argumentThe claim that fat-coated starch escapes salivary amylase and so passes "unchanged" belongs to turn-of-the-century dietetics, not current physiology. It explains why the author insists on thorough baking and thin, friable crust rather than any real health hazard.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Cooking for Two (1909) sits at the point where American domestic science met the newly married household, and its pastry chapter carries both halves of that inheritance: careful ratio work by weight, and a moralising aside about whether pie is good for anyone. The flaky version here is a shortcut lamination -- fat dabbed onto a rolled sheet, folded in three, rolled and coiled -- a home cook's compression of the classic French turned puff paste, which required many more folds and rests. Cottolene, the cottonseed-oil and beef-suet product named alongside lard, had been marketed heavily since the 1890s as a cleaner and cheaper alternative to animal fat, and its appearance in a recipe list like this one shows how quickly manufactured shortening was accepted into ordinary baking. The instruction to wash butter in cold water is a reminder that dairy butter of the period varied a good deal in water and salt content, and that a cook could not simply trust the wrapper.