Crust
2 cups Gold Medal flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 3 teaspoons baking powder 2 tablespoons butter 3/4 cup milk Sift flour, salt and baking powder, rub into it the butter, add the cold milk slowly, shape into a flat cake to fit the pan, cut a hole to let the steam escape, lay over the boiling meat and bake about forty minutes.
A biscuit-dough lid for a meat pie or stew, of the kind that goes on hot and bakes in place. The dough itself is straightforward; almost everything that can go wrong here is a matter of temperature.
- The hinge: the filling must be boiling"Lay over the boiling meat" is an instruction, not a description. A cold or lukewarm filling leaves the underside of the crust steaming in tepid liquid, and it comes out pale and pasty. Have the stew at a full simmer when the lid goes on, and get it into the oven at once.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 400-425F; forty minutes at that heat should brown the top and cook the dough through. At 350F the crust will take longer and is likelier to set rather than rise.
- The flourGold Medal was milled from hard spring wheat, though it was sold as a general household flour; for a baking-powder crust plain all-purpose flour is a safe substitute and will give a tender result.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups is 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup, which is still the standard proportion for a biscuit dough. No adjustment needed, though check that your tin is not years old.
- Rubbing in the butterTwo tablespoons for two cups of flour is a lean crust by modern biscuit standards. Keep the butter cold and rub only to a coarse, uneven crumb; overworking it here, with so little fat, produces something closer to a dumpling than a pastry.
- Cold milk, added slowlyThree-quarters of a cup is a guide rather than a rule, since flours vary in absorption. Stop when the dough just holds together; a slack dough will slump into the gravy.
- The steam holeCut a generous vent, at least an inch across, in the centre before the lid goes on. Steam from a boiling filling has nowhere else to go and will lift the crust off the meat into a hollow dome.
- YieldEnough to cover a 9- to 10-inch pie dish or a shallow casserole, serving four to six depending on the filling beneath it.
These chapters were organised loosely: soups ran into stews, stews into the covered meat pies that used the same pot of boiling meat, and a crust recipe belonged wherever the dish it topped belonged. This is a baking-powder crust rather than a pastry, part of the broad American shift through the nineteenth century from yeast and long-beaten eggs toward chemical leavening, which by the time the Gold Medal book appeared was cheap and reliable. Milling companies published cookbooks like this one as advertising, and the recipes are correspondingly plain and forgiving, written to demonstrate that the brand's flour would behave in whatever a household happened to be cooking that day.