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Pastry for Pies and Tarts
I. Potato Paste (Without Shortening) To three-fourths pint very mealy potatoes add a half teaspoon salt and sufficient flour to make quite stiff. Soften this with cream sufficiently to roll out easily. Bake quickly. 2. Oatmeal Paste (Without Shortening) Scald two cups fine oatmeal with one cup boiling water, mixing thoroughly. Roll thin and line pie-tins, then bake lightly belore filling with pie mixture. 3. Pastry Made with Cream One and three-fourths pints flour in which has been sifted a half teaspoon each of baking powder and salt. Mix into this quickly one cup of cream, rolling thin the IO resulting dough. Spread on this one dessertspoon of butter; fold over and roll out again. 4.
Bread Dough Paste Roll shavings of butter in bread dough, rolling out and spreading it three times. 5. Plain Pastry with Shortening With three cups flour sift one teaspoon salt and one-half teaspoon baking powder. Rub or cut into this threefourths cup of shortening. Moisten with ice water just enough to bind together and roll out. Fine-chopped, fresh beef suet may be used: one-half cupful to each cup of flour. Make a funnel of stiff white paper and insert in top crust with covered fruit pies and the juice will not run out at the edges. (Where the lower crust is baked before adding the tart or pie "filling" or the under crust is omitted, pies and tarts may be light, flaky, and digestible as well as delicious and few need be debarred their old-fashioned delights.)
Five pastry formulas of increasing richness, written when flour was still measured by the pint and ovens by feel. The measurements convert cleanly; the doughs behave very differently from each other.
- Pints of dry measureA pint here is two cups, so the cream pastry uses 3 1/2 cups flour and the potato paste starts from about 1 1/2 cups of mealy potato.
- "Bake quickly"This points to a hot oven rather than a moderate one, though the book gives no temperature figures. It applies to the potato paste only; the oatmeal shell is to be baked "lightly" before filling.
- Fine oatmeal is not rolled oatsPeriod "fine oatmeal" is finely ground oats, closer to oat flour than to modern flakes. Ground rolled oats or commercial oat flour will scald and hold together; whole flakes will not roll thin.
- Cream means heavy creamThe cream doing the work in recipes 1 and 3 is high-fat, unhomogenised cream. Use heavy cream, not half-and-half, or the dough has neither the fat to shorten it nor the body to roll.
- The potato paste must be worked warmThe potato paste is easiest worked warm -- Mashed potato stiffens as it cools. The recipe gives no timing, but a warm mash takes the flour and cream more readily; add only enough flour to stop it sticking.
- Bread dough paste needs a risen doughBread dough paste -- Recipe 4 starts from raised bread dough already made up. Three rounds of butter shavings, fold and roll make a rough yeasted puff; keeping it cold between turns stops the butter smearing in.
- Suet substitutionHalf a cup of chopped suet per cup of flour is far more fat than the 3/4 cup per 3 cups of the main version. Fresh beef suet, finely chopped and kept cold, is now a butcher's order; frozen shredded suet works, and lard or butter behaves closer to modern expectations.
- The paper funnelA rolled cone of stiff paper set into a slit in the top crust vents steam upward instead of out at the seam. A modern equivalent is a metal pie bird or simply two or three generous slashes.
- YieldRecipe 5 makes enough for one double-crust 9-inch pie; the cream pastry, at 3 1/2 cups flour, makes rather more, roughly a double crust plus a few tart shells.
The parenthetical remark about crusts being "digestible as well as delicious" and about "few need be debarred their old-fashioned delights" fits the dietetic current of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when rich shortened crusts were often blamed for dyspepsia and cookery writers offered potato, oatmeal and cream pastes as lighter alternatives. Measuring flour by the pint rather than the cup reflects an older habit of household measurement; standardised cup measurement was still spreading through American recipe writing at the time. The paper funnel is the sort of practical trick that circulated in household manuals before pie birds were sold commercially.