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Farmers' Pie Crust
1 pint Five Roses flour ¾ cup butter or lard 1 cup buttermilk 1 teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon salt.
An ingredient list with no method, which was normal in a milling company's book aimed at cooks who already knew how pastry went together. What it does need is a reading of the measures and an understanding of why there is soda in it at all.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume here: a pint is 2 cups, roughly 9 oz or 250 g of all-purpose flour scooped and levelled. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Manitoba flour, stronger than most modern all-purpose, so work the dough as little as possible.
- The soda is the hingeThe teaspoon of soda is there to react with the acid in the buttermilk, giving a crust closer to a rolled biscuit than to flaky pastry. Sift or whisk it thoroughly through the dry flour first — a pocket of undissolved soda leaves a soapy, yellow-brown patch.
- Method, reconstructedWhisk flour, soda and salt; cut in the cold fat until it is in pea-sized pieces; stir in the buttermilk quickly to a soft dough. Do not knead, and let it rest 20 minutes chilled before rolling.
- Buttermilk then and nowFarmhouse buttermilk was the thin liquid left from churning butter. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is generally thicker and can be sharper; it works, but hold back a couple of tablespoons and add them only if the flour is dry.
- SaltA full teaspoon suits unsalted lard or sweet butter. With modern salted butter, cut it to about half.
- FatLard gives the tender, short result the recipe was written for; butter gives more flavour and a firmer crust. Either must be cold, and the dough must be handled while it still shows visible flecks of it.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature; a wood or coal range of the period generally had no dial to set. Bake at 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F to finish — a soda crust colours quickly.
- YieldEnough for a double-crust 9-inch pie, or two single shells.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great promotional cookbooks of early twentieth-century Canada, distributed in enormous numbers to sell Manitoba hard-wheat flour to home bakers. A recipe called "Farmers'" anything in such a book signals thrift and the farm dairy: buttermilk was a by-product of churning butter and cost nothing, and pairing it with soda gave lift without eggs or baking powder. The result is a crust in the biscuit tradition rather than the French one — sturdy, faintly tangy, well suited to a deep pie of meat or apples carried out to a field. Volume measures for flour, still the norm in these books, are one reason results varied from kitchen to kitchen, and part of why the miller had an interest in promising consistency in the bag.