Plain Pastry
1 1/2 cups Gold Medal flour 1/2 cup shortening 1/2 teaspoon salt Cold water The shortening may be all lard or all butter, or 1/4 cup lard and 1/4 cup butter. Butter makes more flaky crust than lard. Have everything cold. Mix flour and salt, cut in the shortening until mixture is like fine meal. Make a stiff paste with ice water. All pastry needs a quick oven at first to keep it from melting. Never grease the pie plate. Tin or granite ware plates are the best for use. Cut holes in the upper crust for the escape of steam. The English method of baking fruit pies in deep dishes with no under crust is most wholesome. Their meat and game pies made in this way are excellent. To make this rule flaky use half lard and half butter. Cut the lard into the flour to a fine meal, add the ice water and roll out to one-third inch thick. Dot on one-half the butter in thin pieces, dust with Gold Medal flour and fold in thirds; pat and roll out again, repeat this till the butter is used and roll up as a jelly roll. Cut from the ends and roll into a sheet.
A standard turn-of-the-century short crust with a rough-puff variation tacked on the end. The instructions are sound; only the vocabulary and the oven language need translating.
- Keep everything coldThis is the hinge, and the recipe says so twice. The fat must stay in distinct pieces until it hits the oven, where its water flashes to steam and lifts the layers. Chilled fat, ice water, and minimal handling matter more than any measurement here.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. Pastry set at a high initial heat has its structure locked before the fat can simply melt and soak into the flour; drop to 350-375F once the crust has taken hold if the filling needs longer.
- "Shortening" in this bookIt means any solid fat that shortens pastry, as the recipe's own note makes clear: lard, butter, or a mix. It does not mean hydrogenated vegetable shortening, which was not yet on the market when these Gold Medal books began appearing. Use lard or butter as written.
- The water is left to you"Cold water" with no quantity is normal for period pastry. Expect roughly 4 to 5 tablespoons of ice water for this much flour, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres. "Stiff paste" means firm and barely tacky, not soft.
- Flour then and nowGold Medal was a hard-wheat patent flour, and modern all-purpose is a reasonable stand-in. If your all-purpose runs high in protein, a dough that fights back can be relaxed with 30 minutes in the refrigerator before rolling.
- Pie platesGranite ware is thin sheet steel coated in speckled enamel; the recipe recommends it alongside plain tin, without saying why. A thin metal pan does the same job today; glass is fine but bakes a little slower. The instruction never to grease the plate still holds, since the crust has fat enough of its own.
- The flaky variationThe second half of the recipe is a rough puff: lard rubbed in, butter laminated through repeated folds. Chill the dough whenever the butter begins to soften or it will smear into the flour instead of layering. Rolling the finished block like a jelly roll and slicing it, as the recipe directs, gives spiral pieces that rise in layers when rolled out and baked.
- YieldRoughly enough for one 9-inch single crust. Period crusts were rolled thinner than modern ones, so it may stretch to a thin double crust for a smaller pie; if you want a substantial modern double crust, increase the quantities.
This comes from one of the flour-mill cookbooks that Washburn-Crosby of Minneapolis published to promote Gold Medal, a genre that put branded recipe pamphlets into American kitchens. The advice reads as a compressed lesson in what a housekeeper was expected to know about pastry: the relative merits of lard and butter, the reason for a hot oven at the start, the steam vents in the top crust. The aside praising "the English method" of baking fruit in a deep dish with no under crust reflects a long-running Anglo-American difference in pie construction, the British deep-dish pie with a single pastry lid against the American two-crust pie in a shallow plate, and the word "wholesome" carries the period's dietary anxiety about rich, fat-soaked bottom crusts sitting heavy on the digestion.