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Plain Pastry (Contributed by a Confectioner's Daughter)
1 pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound butter ½ pound lard (Little more flour for rolling pin and board) Cold water.
Work lard through flour with fingers.
Use enough cold water to stick paste together, then turn out on board. Roll with rolling pin and spread on the butter a little at a time. Then fold over and roll again, repeating this process until all the butter is used up. If richer pastry is desired, use ½ 1/2 pound of butter.
This is a rough puff tenderness and flake, built by rolling butter into a lard shortcrust rather than by enclosing a single block. The whole method depends on keeping the fats firm.
- Weights into cups1 lb of flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups scooped and levelled; weigh it if you can, since Five Roses was a strong flour and the ratio matters here. ¼ lb butter is half a cup (1 stick), ½ lb lard is 1 cup. Cold water will run about ½ to ⅔ cup, added by feel.
- The hinge: temperatureThe lard is rubbed in for shortness, but the butter is layered in for flake, and it must stay cool and pliable, not soft or melted. If it starts to smear into the dough, refrigerate everything 20 minutes before continuing. The recipe gives no guidance on temperature, which probably reflects a kitchen and pantry cooler than most modern ones.
- Strong flour, light handFive Roses was milled from Canadian hard red spring wheat, high in gluten. Use only enough water to make the mass cohere, and rest the dough 30 minutes in the fridge before the final roll so it does not shrink and toughen in the pan.
- "Spread on the butter a little at a time"In practice: roll to a rectangle, dot or smear a third of the butter over two-thirds of the surface, fold in three, give it a quarter turn, roll out again, and repeat twice more. Three rounds uses up the ¼ lb comfortably.
- LardModern supermarket lard is often hydrogenated and behaves differently from the unhydrogenated lard of the period. The recipe specifies only 'lard'; leaf lard or a good rendered pork fat will give the short, sandy texture, and substituting all butter tends to give a firmer, less short crust.
- No oven givenThe book leaves baking to the individual pie recipes. Laminated pastry of this kind wants a hot start: 425-450F for the first 15 minutes to set the layers, then down to 350-375F to finish the filling.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of dough, enough for roughly two 9-inch double-crust pies if rolled thin, or three to four single shells with trimmings for tarts.
- The richer versionDoubling the butter to ½ lb brings the total fat to 1 lb against 1 lb flour. That is a very rich paste that handles best when thoroughly chilled and rolled quickly on a well-floured board.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose Five Roses brand was one of the great names in Canadian flour, and its contents were largely drawn from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, a good many credited by description or locality rather than by name. Hence "a Confectioner's Daughter": the attribution reads as a claim to authority, and the staged layering of butter looks like a simplified confectioner's puff adapted to a domestic board. The heavy reliance on lard is characteristic of the period, when rendered pork fat was cheap, plentiful and reckoned to make a shorter crust than butter alone. Recipes of this era say nothing about chilling, which probably reflects cooler kitchens and pantries than ours.