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Paste with Lard
1 1/2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/3 cup lard Cold water Mix salt with flour. Reserve one and one-fourth tablespoons lard, work in remainder to flour, using tips of fingers or a case knife. Moisten to a dough with water. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll out. Spread with one tablespoon reserved lard, dredge with flour, roll up like a jelly roll, pat, and roll out; again roll up. Cut from the end of roll a piece large enough to line a pie plate. Pat and roll out, keeping the paste as circular in form as possible. With care and experience there need be no trimmings. Worked-over pastry is never as satisfactory. The remaining one-fourth tablespoon lard is used to dot over upper crust of pie just before sending to oven; this gives the pie a flaky appearance. Ice-water has a similar effect. If milk is brushed over the pie it has a glazed appearance. This quantity of paste will make one pie with two crusts and a few puffs, or two pies with one crust where the rim is built up and fluted.
A plain lard crust given a rough lamination by rolling it up twice, from an era when pastry books assumed the cook already knew how cold to keep things and how hot to fire the oven.
- The hinge: keep it coldLard is soft and plastic over a wide temperature range, and the rolled-up layers only stay separate if the fat is firm. Use lard straight from the refrigerator, ice water to moisten, and chill the lined plate for twenty minutes before filling.
- Water quantityThe original gives none. For 1 1/2 cups flour expect about 4 to 5 tablespoons of ice water, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed.
- What the lard isRendered pork fat, sold in blocks. Look for leaf lard or a non-hydrogenated brand; the shelf-stable hydrogenated tubs behave differently and taste flatter. Weight is about 2 1/2 oz for the 1/3 cup.
- "Case knife"A table knife. Two knives or a pastry blender do the same job and keep finger heat out of the fat, which matters more here than the tool.
- The reserved lardOne tablespoon is smeared between the layers to create the rolled-up lamination; the last quarter tablespoon is dotted on the top crust. The recipe itself offers brushed ice-water as an alternative to the dotting for the same flaky appearance.
- OvenNo temperature is given, and none can be inferred from the text. By modern practice a filled double-crust pie is started hot, around 425F, to set the pastry, then dropped to 350F to cook the filling through; a blind-baked shell wants 425F with weights.
- Worked-over pastryThe warning is sound. Rerolled scraps develop gluten and lose the layer structure, so cut the round generously from the end of the roll rather than piecing it together.
- YieldOne double-crust pie plus, the recipe says, a few puffs; or two single crusts with the rim built up and fluted. The dough freezes well wrapped tightly.