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Rich Short Crust
8 ounces Five Roses flour 5 ounces butter 1 egg (yolk) Few drops lemon juice.
Sift the flour, rub the butter in lightly and quickly. Make a well in the centre, into which put the egg yolk, lemon juice and a few drops of water. Mix lightly, roll out once and it is ready for use.
A pâte brisée-style short crust given by weight, with no oven instruction because the book expects you to bake it according to whatever fills it. Two things decide whether it works: temperature and restraint.
- The hinge: keep everything cold and stop mixing earlyRubbing in "lightly and quickly" and rolling "once" are the whole method. Butter left in small distinct pieces and a dough handled as little as possible is what makes the crust short; warm hands and a second rolling tend to produce something tough and shrunken.
- Weights in cups8 ounces of flour is about 1 3/4 cups scooped and levelled, though weighing is far more reliable here. 5 ounces of butter is 10 tablespoons, or one stick plus two.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose flour milled from hard spring wheat, sold by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company. It is stronger than most modern American all-purpose flour, so if you substitute a bleached soft-wheat brand the dough will come together with slightly less water and even less working.
- "A few drops of water" is under-statedWith a yolk and 5 ounces of butter you will still usually need 2 to 4 tablespoons of ice water to bring 8 ounces of flour into a coherent dough. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop the moment the mass holds when pressed.
- What the lemon juice is doingA small acid addition is conventionally said to slacken gluten slightly and to help keep the dough from toughening and from going grey at the edges. A quarter teaspoon is plenty; more will be tasted.
- Rest before rollingThe original moves straight from mixing to rolling. Thirty minutes wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the dough and firms the butter, and it will roll thinner with less cracking and shrink less in the oven.
- BakingFor a blind-baked shell, line and weight it and start at 425F for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and finish at 375F until the base is dry and pale gold. Filled tarts follow the filling's own temperature.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch single-crust pie or tart shell with trimmings to spare, or a dozen or more small tartlets.
The Five Roses Cook Book was compiled by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to buyers of its flour, which is why the ingredient list names the brand rather than simply "flour" — the book was an advertisement that happened to be genuinely useful, and it became a fixture in Canadian kitchens through the early twentieth century. The crust itself is the standard British short paste of the period, enriched a step beyond plain pastry by the egg yolk and the high proportion of butter; recipes of this type, sometimes labelled "rich short crust," were generally favoured for tarts and small fancy pastries, while cheaper crusts made with lard or drippings did the work of meat pies and everyday fruit pies. The lemon juice is an old professional habit, generally explained as a way of keeping the paste tender and the flour from discolouring.