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Pastry for One Pie
½ cup lard and butter (mixed) 1½ cups Five Roses flour 3 tablespoons water Pinch of salt.
Roll thin.
Four lines and no method beyond "roll thin" — the book assumes you already know how pastry is made. The proportions are sound; what needs translating is the flour, the fat and the missing temperature.
- The hinge: keep everything coldHalf a cup of solid fat to 1½ cups flour is a rich, short dough that turns greasy the moment the fat softens. Cut the chilled fat in until the largest pieces are pea-sized, add ice water, and stop mixing the instant it holds together.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring wheat all-purpose flour, noticeably stronger than modern soft-wheat pastry flour. Ordinary unbleached all-purpose is the closest match; if you use pastry flour you may need a touch less water.
- Lard and butter mixedThe recipe does not give the proportions; a half-and-half mix is one reasonable reading, giving something of the flakiness of lard and the flavour of butter. Modern hydrogenated shortening behaves differently from the lard of the period, and rendered leaf lard, if you can get it, is likely the truer substitute.
- Three tablespoons of waterThat is on the dry side by current practice, though a fat-rich dough needs less water than a lean one. Have a fourth tablespoon of ice water standing by and add it only if the dough will not gather.
- Pinch of saltRead it as about ¼ teaspoon fine salt; dissolving it in the water helps it distribute evenly. Salted butter was most likely what such a kitchen had on hand, so if you use salted butter, consider cutting the added salt in half.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch single crust with an edge to crimp, and possibly a thin two-crust pie in a smaller plate if rolled very thin. The book does not say how thin 'roll thin' is; about ⅛ inch is a reasonable modern reading.
- Baking temperatureThe recipe gives none. For a filled fruit pie start at 425°F for 15 minutes, then drop to 350°F. For a blind-baked shell, line with paper and weights and bake at 400°F until the edges colour, then remove the weights to dry the base.
- Rest before rollingWrap and chill the dough 30 minutes. Recipes of this kind seldom mention it, but it relaxes the gluten a strong flour like this develops and helps stop the shell shrinking down the sides of the plate.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, one of the great flour milling houses of the Canadian prairie wheat boom, and it belongs to a genre of brand cookbooks that millers and grocers issued in large numbers in the early twentieth century — the recipes contributed by users of the flour, printed cheaply, and sold or given away to keep a particular sack of flour in the pantry. That explains the brevity here: the reader was assumed to know how pastry was made, and the book's job was to fix in her mind that the proportion worked with this flour. Mixed lard-and-butter crusts were common in North America at the time, lard being cheap, plentiful from the household pig or the packing houses, and prized for shortness, while butter supplied a flavour lard alone lacks.