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Flaky Pie Crust
Rub 1½ cups lard into 3 cups Five Roses flour, add a pinch of salt. Beat the white of 1 egg slightly. Add 5 tablespoons water to it and mix with the other ingredients into a soft dough. Do not mix more than necessary and do not use a lot of flour on the working board in making the dough, and the crust will be light and flaky.
A high-fat pastry from a Canadian flour-milling cookbook, built on lard and a beaten egg white rather than all water. The ratio is unusually rich, and the technique notes at the end are the whole point.
- The hinge: keep it cold and barely mixedWith this much fat, overworking the dough or letting it warm turns it greasy and short instead of flaky. Use chilled lard, cut it in only until the pieces are pea-sized, and stop the moment the dough holds together.
- The fat ratio1½ cups lard to 3 cups flour is roughly 11 oz fat to 13 oz flour, noticeably richer than most modern crusts, which run nearer two parts flour to one of fat. It produces a very tender, crumbly pastry that is fragile to roll; expect to patch it rather than lift it in one piece.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian flour milled from hard spring wheat, stronger and higher in protein than most American all-purpose. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose works; measure by weight if you can, since 3 cups scooped can vary by a couple of ounces.
- LardPeriod lard was rendered leaf or back fat with real structure. Modern shelf-stable lard is often hydrogenated and softer; rendered leaf lard from a butcher behaves much more like what the recipe assumes.
- The egg whiteThe white is not leavening. It adds protein that sets in the heat and helps the layers hold, and it makes the dough slightly easier to handle. Beat it only until loosened, not foamy.
- WaterFive tablespoons plus the white is a firm quantity for this much flour. Add it gradually and hold back the last tablespoon if the dough is already coming together.
- Resting and rollingChill the dough at least 30 minutes before rolling; the original says nothing about this, but it makes a rich dough far more manageable. Roll on the lightest possible dusting of flour, as instructed — excess flour on the board is what toughens the finished crust.
- Yield and bakingEnough for about one double-crust 9-inch pie, or two to three single shells. The recipe gives no baking directions; by modern practice shells are blind-baked in a hot oven (around 425F) until set and pale gold, and filled double-crust pies started hot before the heat is dropped.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and later Ogilvie, and it belongs to a genre of promotional cookery books issued by flour millers to put their brand name into every recipe a household used. Much of the content came from customers — the books solicited and printed recipes from women across Canada — which may help explain why the same book will carry three or four competing pastry methods with slightly different fat ratios. Lard was the default pastry fat in Canadian kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheaper and more available than butter and prized for tenderness; the beaten egg white here is often said to be a home baker's trick of the period, credited with helping a very rich dough hold together, and the closing warning against overworking the dough or flouring the board heavily is advice that recurs in pastry recipes of the era.