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Plain Pastry
Put in mixing bowl 5 tablespoons shortening 3 tablespoons ice water and 1/2 teaspoon salt, and work until creamy, using wooden spoon. Add 1 cup pastry flour and mix by cutting with a knife. Sprinkle pastry cloth or board with 2 tablespoons flour. Pat with rolling pin and roll the pastry to fit a large pie plate. Line the plate with the pastry and build up a fluted rim.
A single-crust shell in the American style of the 1920s, built by creaming the fat with water first rather than cutting it into the flour. The method is unusual enough to be worth following exactly.
- The hinge: cream the fat and water firstBeating shortening, ice water and salt to a smooth cream before any flour goes in is the whole point of this method — it distributes the fat evenly and gives a short, tender, slightly mealy crust rather than a flaky layered one. If you cut the fat into the flour instead, you have made a different pastry.
- Quantities and yieldOne cup of flour to 5 tablespoons fat makes a single bottom crust; the recipe specifies only a "large pie plate," so roughly 9 inches is a reasonable reading. There is no top crust here, and no sugar, so it suits custard, pumpkin and creamed luncheon fillings.
- Pastry flourPastry flour runs about 8–9% protein. If you have only all-purpose, replace 2 tablespoons of the cup with cornstarch, or expect a slightly tougher shell. Bread flour will not do.
- ShorteningIn the 1920s this would mean hydrogenated vegetable shortening (Crisco-type) or lard, both of which take water more readily than butter. Modern shortening has been reformulated and may behave slightly differently. Butter is unlikely to cream smoothly with ice water at this ratio.
- Mixing with a knifeCutting the flour in with a knife rather than stirring is deliberate — it limits gluten development. Stop the moment the flour disappears; the dough should look shaggy, not smooth.
- The 2 tablespoons of dusting flourThat flour is part of the working plan, not an afterthought, and some of it ends up in the crust. Use it sparingly on a cloth if you have one; excess dusting flour dries the shell.
- Baking, which the recipe omitsFor a blind-baked shell, prick the base, line with parchment and weights, and bake at 425°F for 12–15 minutes, then remove the weights and give it another 5 minutes until pale gold. For a filled custard pie, bake at the temperature the filling requires.
- Rest before rollingNot in the original, but 20 minutes in the refrigerator makes the disc far easier to roll to an even round and reduces shrinkage down the fluted rim.
Alice Bradley, who directed the Miss Farmer School of Cookery in Boston and edited the cookery pages of Woman's Home Companion, published this in a slim book of dishes for entertaining at the informal meals that had become fashionable in the 1920s — luncheon and supper rather than dinner. The creamed-shortening method she gives here belongs to that moment: solid vegetable shortening had been on the American market since the 1910s. Calling it "plain" pastry distinguishes it from puff paste and from the sweetened, richer doughs used for tarts; plain pastry was the workhorse, expected to hold a chicken à la king or a custard without drawing attention to itself.