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Puff Paste
To every pound of Five Roses flour, allow 3 ounces butter and 3 ounces lard, and not quite ½ pint water.
Sift the flour and see that it is perfectly dry. Work the materials into a smooth paste, using a knife to mix with.
Roll out to an equal thickness of about 1 inch. Break about 4 ounces more butter into small pieces and place on the paste.
Sift over a little flour, fold it over and roll out again. Repeat the rolling and buttering until the paste has been rolled 4 times. Handle the paste as lightly as possible.
Brushing the paste as often as rolled out and the pieces of butter placed therein with the white of an egg assist it to rise in leaves or flakes.
Note on Puff Paste-For the richest puff pastry, all butter is preferred by the best cooks-equal weights shortening and Five Roses flour.
A short, terse set of directions of the sort written for cooks who already knew what puff paste should feel like. A few of the figures need translating, and one instruction is almost certainly a misprint.
- Weights to volumeA pound of flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups sifted; 3 ounces of butter is 6 tablespoons. "Not quite ½ pint water" is a little under 1 cup by US measure, and rather more — nearer 1¼ cups — if the book intends an imperial pint; add it gradually in either case, since flour absorbency varies and the dough wants to be firm, not slack.
- The one-inch thicknessRolling puff paste to "about 1 inch" is far thicker than the usual direction for laminated paste and may well be a misprint. Roll thin enough to fold cleanly, thick enough that the butter does not break through.
- Lard and butterThe 3 oz butter plus 3 oz lard forms the base dough; the additional 4 oz butter is the laminating fat. Lard sold today is not the same product as the leaf lard the book assumed — chill it hard, or follow the book's own note and use all butter.
- Cold is the hingeNothing in the text says so, but the whole thing depends on the butter staying solid and distinct. Rest the paste in the refrigerator between the four rollings; if the fat begins to melt into the flour you get shortcrust, not flakes.
- Egg white brushingThe egg white between layers is an old trick, seldom seen now. Its effect is arguable; modern practice generally leans on cold fat and even folding instead.
- Four turnsFour rollings gives a modest number of layers by modern standards — commercial puff paste uses six or more. Extra turns will improve the rise if the dough is kept cold and rested.
- BakingThe recipe gives no oven direction at all, and home ranges of the period were not commonly fitted with thermometers. As modern guidance, puff paste wants a hot oven, around 425–450F, so the water in the butter flashes to steam and lifts the layers before the fat can render out.
- YieldA pound of flour makes enough paste for roughly one double-crust pie, or a batch of small patty shells. It freezes well, wrapped, after the final turn.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to Canadian households who bought its flour — a promotional book that became a fixture in prairie kitchens through the 1910s and 1920s, and one reason "Five Roses" appears in the recipe text where another book would simply say flour. Puff paste itself is far older, generally traced to the French pâte feuilletée and standardised in professional kitchens well before it reached domestic manuals; the half-and-half butter and lard here is a compromise between cost and richness that the book's own closing note quietly disowns in favour of all butter. The instruction to mix with a knife rather than the hands reflects a real concern of the period: warm fingers were understood to be the enemy of flaky pastry long before anyone explained it in terms of steam and gluten.