Home › Pies of All Kinds › Cream Pie Crust (No Butter or Lard)
Cream Pie Crust (No Butter or Lard)
For a good cream pie crust made without butter or lard, try this simple and never-failing recipe: To 1 pint of sifted Five Roses flour add 1 even teaspoon baking powder and sweet cream enough to moisten the flour to a dough just stiff enough to work. Roll out quickly and bake in a quick oven.
This is enough for 2 pies of single crust.
A pastry that gets all its fat from the butterfat in cream, which means the fat content of your cream is the whole recipe. Everything else is a matter of not overworking it.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in this book: 1 pint is 2 cups, roughly 8 to 9 oz after sifting. Sift before measuring, as directed, or the dough will run dry.
- Which cream"Sweet cream" means unsoured cream, not sweetened. Use heavy whipping cream at 35 percent fat or more; half-and-half or light cream will not supply enough fat and the crust bakes hard rather than short. Expect to need about 1/2 to 2/3 cup, added a little at a time.
- Quick ovenThe book gives no temperatures; the term was generally taken to mean roughly 400 to 450F. The high heat sets the crust quickly.
- Roll out quicklyThis is the hinge. Cream pastry warms and slackens fast in the hands, and gluten develops with every extra pass of the pin. Mix just to a cohesive dough, roll once, and get it into the pan. Chilling the rolled shell 15 minutes before baking helps it hold its shape.
- Single crust means blind bakingSingle crust -- one crust per pie, a bottom shell rather than a top and bottom. If you are baking the shell empty for a filling added later, dock the base, line with parchment and weights for the first 12 to 15 minutes, then finish uncovered until pale gold.
- Baking powderOne level teaspoon of modern double-acting baking powder is right. It is there for a little lift and tenderness, not rise, so do not increase it or the crust will taste soapy.
- YieldTwo 8- or 9-inch single shells, or one double-crust pie if you prefer.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour, and it presented its recipes as contributed and tested by Canadian housewives. Butter and lard were the ordinary pastry fats, but on a farm with a dairy cow cream was readily to hand while butter represented labour and cash at market. Cream pastry appears in late nineteenth and early twentieth century North American community cookbooks under names like cream crust and sour cream crust, and the principle is sound: butterfat is butterfat, whether it arrives churned or still suspended in liquid. "Never-failing" was standard promotional language of the period.