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New Pie Crust
Scald 2 parts of fine oatmeal with 1 part of hot water. Mix well and roll fairly thin. This bakes very quickly, so if using fruit which requires much cooking cook the fruit first. This crust is very tender and possesses the qualities of good short crust, and is healthier.
A two-ingredient crust with no fat and no wheat, built entirely on the way hot water swells fine oatmeal into a workable paste. It behaves nothing like pastry, and the instructions assume you already know that.
- "Parts" means volume"Parts" is a ratio, not a measure -- the original gives no quantities, so read it as two measures of fine oatmeal to one of hot water, taken by cup or by weight as you prefer, and scale to the tin you are filling. A pinch of salt, which the original omits, is worth adding.
- Fine oatmeal is not rolled oatsThe recipe wants finely ground oatmeal, the Scottish milling grade somewhere between pinhead and flour. Rolled oats will not scald into a cohesive paste; grind them in a food processor first, or use commercial fine or medium oatmeal.
- Scald means boiling water, poured on at onceScald means water at or near boiling -- the recipe says only "hot water", but scalding implies it is hot enough to gelatinise the starch and bind the meal, since there is no fat, egg or gluten doing that work. Merely warm water is likely to give a crumbly mass that will not roll.
- Mix and roll while warmThe paste stiffens as it cools and cracks at the edges. Roll it between two sheets of parchment or waxed paper, then invert into the tin and patch tears with your fingertips.
- "Bakes very quickly" means hot and briefThe original gives no temperature or time. A hot oven, in the region of 425F for roughly 12 to 15 minutes until set and lightly coloured, is a reasonable modern reading. With no gluten structure it can scorch fast, so watch it closely.
- Cook the fruit first, as instructedThe crust is done long before apples or rhubarb soften. Fill with fruit already cooked and thickened, or blind-bake the shell entirely and treat it as a base for a cold or set filling.
- "Healthier" is a period claimThe selling point was the absence of lard or shortening, at a time when oatmeal carried a reputation as a wholesome and strengthening food. Judge it as a fat-free oat crust and expect a nutty, biscuit-like texture rather than flake.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its Five Roses flour, and copies were distributed in enormous numbers across Canada in the years around the First World War; much of its content came from housewives who wrote in with their own methods, which is why entries like this one read as a tip passed along rather than a tested formula. An oatmeal crust sits oddly in a flour miller's book, and its presence says something about the period: oatmeal was cheap, Scottish-Canadian kitchens knew it intimately, and reform-minded cookery writers of the 1900s and 1910s were pressing the case that lard-heavy pastry was indigestible. Scalded oatmeal doughs belong to a much older northern British tradition of bannocks and oatcakes, where boiling water rather than fat is what makes the meal cohere, and this recipe is essentially that technique turned to the service of a pie tin.