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For Crust
Take 2 cups Five Roses flour in the sieve with 1 teaspoon salt, ¼ soda and cream of tartar. Sift this and mix well one small cup lard into it. Then mix with cold water soft enough to roll. Roll quite thin and cover well-greased pie plates. Fill the crusts with the berries. For top crusts roll remaining dough quite thin and cut in ⅛ inch strips. Cross the pies quite closely both ways, and bake until brown in a quick oven. These are delicious when served with whipped cream.
A plain lard pastry with a lattice top, written for a cook who already knew how much sugar her berries needed. Two things need filling in: the leavening measure and the filling itself.
- The hinge: keep everything coldLard is soft at room temperature and a warm dough will absorb water and turn tough. Chill the lard until firm, cut it in until the pieces are pea-sized rather than fully blended, and use ice water. The instruction to "mix well" should be read as distributing the fat, not creaming it in.
- "¼ soda and cream of tartar"Read this as ¼ teaspoon of each, carried over from the teaspoon in the previous clause. Together they act as a homemade baking powder, giving a slightly puffed, biscuit-like pastry rather than a flaky one. You can substitute ½ teaspoon baking powder, or leave both out for a plainer crust.
- A small cup of lardRoughly ⅔ cup, about 5 oz or 140 g. Much modern shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves differently from home-rendered lard; refrigerated leaf lard gives a closer result.
- A quick ovenUsually glossed as about 400-425F. Start there for the first 15 minutes to set the bottom crust, then drop to 375F for another 25-35 minutes until the lattice is browned and the fruit is bubbling at the centre.
- The filling is left to you"Fill the crusts with the berries" assumes you will sweeten and thicken to taste. For a 9-inch pie, figure 4-5 cups of berries, ¾ cup sugar, and 3 tablespoons of cornstarch, flour or tapioca; without a thickener a berry pie floods.
- Skip the greasingA pastry this rich in lard does not need it, though the recipe as written calls for well-greased plates.
- Yield2 cups of flour is normally one double-crust 9-inch pie; the plural pie plates in the original implies two, which works only if the dough is rolled as thin as directed. Serve warm, with the whipped cream as directed.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, headquartered in Montreal, one of the great Canadian flour brands, and like most milling-company cookbooks it existed to sell flour: the brand name is worked into the ingredient lines throughout. That commercial origin explains the recipe's shape. It assumes a cook who knows her berries and her oven and needs only a reliable pastry to put them in, so the filling gets one sentence and the crust gets all the rest. The soda-and-cream-of-tartar pairing belongs to the period before commercial baking powder had displaced it; mixed in the sieve with the flour, the two acted as a powder made fresh at the moment of use. Lard, not butter, was the usual pie fat in much North American home baking well into the twentieth century, being cheaper and more plentiful on farms.