Home › Pastry and Crust Making › Short Pie Crust
Short Pie Crust
1 pound Five Roses flour ¼ pound butter ¼ pound lard 2 ounces fine sugar 1 teaspoon (small) salt 1 Egg 2 teaspoons baking powder Water.
Sift flour, sugar, salt and baking powder together. Rub butter and lard lightly into the flour, etc. Beat the egg and add sufficient water to mix. This pastry will keep good for a fortnight at least.
A weight-based English-style short pastry, enriched with egg and lifted slightly with baking powder. The proportions are sound; only the units and the storage advice need attention.
- Weights into cups1 lb flour is roughly 3½ to 4 cups depending on how it is scooped, ¼ lb butter is 1 stick (½ cup), ¼ lb lard is about ½ cup, and 2 oz sugar is about ¼ cup. Weighing is more reliable here, since the fat-to-flour ratio is what makes the crust short.
- The unmeasured water"Sufficient water to mix" with one beaten egg comes to roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons of ice water for this quantity of flour, but flour and humidity vary. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop when the dough just coheres when pressed.
- Keep it cold, work it littleThe fats must stay cold and not melt into the flour. "Rub lightly" means fingertips or a pastry blender until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs, then stop. Rest the dough at least 30 minutes before rolling so the gluten relaxes and it does not shrink in the tin.
- LardLeaf lard or plain rendered lard gives the flakiness intended; modern hydrogenated shelf-stable lard works but is blander. Butter alone can be substituted for the whole ½ lb of fat, with a slightly firmer, less flaky result.
- The baking powderTwo teaspoons in a pound of flour is unusual by later standards and produces a puffier, more biscuit-like crust rather than a crisp flaky one. It can be reduced to one teaspoon or omitted entirely without harming the pastry.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe leaves the baking to the cook. For a filled fruit pie, 425F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F until the filling bubbles; for a blind-baked shell, 400F with weights until dry and pale gold.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of dough: enough for one double-crust 9-inch pie plus a single shell, or roughly three single 9-inch crusts.
- "Will keep good for a fortnight"That assumed a cold pantry or icebox. With butter, lard and raw egg in it, this dough belongs in the refrigerator, where it holds three or four days; wrapped tightly it freezes for three months.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and circulated in enormous numbers in the 1910s and 1920s as advertising for Five Roses flour — a book given or sold cheaply to households so that they would buy the brand named in every recipe. Much of its content came from recipes submitted by Canadian housewives, and the pastry chapter carries several overlapping crusts of differing richness rather than one authoritative formula. This one is the English short-crust tradition: half fat to flour by weight, sweetened a little, bound with egg, and stretched further with lard, which was the ordinary pie fat in Canadian kitchens well into the twentieth century. The note that it keeps a fortnight suggests a period when pastry may have been mixed ahead and drawn on over some days, though how commonly cooks did so is not well documented.