Plain Paste
1 1/2 cups flour 1/4 cup lard 1/4 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon salt. Cold water Wash butter, pat, and form in circular piece. Add salt to flour, and work in lard with tips of fingers or case knife. Moisten to dough with cold water; ice-water is not an essential, but is desirable in summer. Toss on board dredged sparingly with flour, pat, and roll out; fold in butter as for puff paste, pat, and roll out. Fold so as to make three layers, turn half-way round, pat, and roll out; repeat. The pastry may be used at once; if not, fold in cheese-cloth, put in covered tin, and keep in cold place, but never in direct contact with ice. Plain paste requires a moderate oven. This is superior paste.
A rough-puff crust built on the old distinction between plain paste and true puff paste: the lard is rubbed in, the butter is rolled in as layers. It works well in a modern kitchen with almost no adjustment beyond knowing what the vessels and oven words mean.
- The hinge: keep the butter in sheetsThe lard is rubbed into the flour for tenderness; the butter is folded in whole so it stays in flat layers and lifts the dough as it steams. If the butter smears into the flour during rolling, chill the dough 20 minutes and carry on -- you will have a good short crust but not a flaky one.
- Washing the butterNineteenth-century butter was salty and wet. Working it under cold water in a bowl pressed out buttermilk and excess salt so the layers would not tear or over-season the paste. Modern unsalted butter needs none of this; take it straight from the refrigerator and pat it into a flat square.
- Case knifeA plain table knife. Two of them, or a pastry blender, cut the lard into the flour without warming it from your hands.
- Water quantityNone is given, as was usual. Expect about 4 to 6 tablespoons of ice water for this amount of flour, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed.
- Moderate ovenConventionally reckoned somewhere around 350-375F. Most modern pie recipes start pastry hotter, 400 to 425F, to set the layers before the fat melts out; at the lower end expect a paler, more slowly crisped crust and a longer time in the oven.
- LardLeaf lard, if you can find it, gives the tenderness the recipe assumes. Supermarket hydrogenated lard is firmer and blander; an equal weight of shortening or additional chilled butter will substitute, with slightly less shortness.
- Resting and storageCheesecloth and a covered tin were to keep the paste from drying and from taking on icebox odours -- "never in direct contact with ice" means the block of ice in the chest, which would sweat into the dough. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate up to two days, or freeze for a month.
- YieldAbout 12 oz of pastry: one 9-inch single crust, or a thin double crust at a stretch.
"Plain paste" is the workaday member of a family of pastries that older American and English cookbooks graded carefully -- puff paste with its many turns and its weight of butter equal to the flour, then plain or half-puff paste, then the simplest rubbed short crust for everyday pies. This one sits in the middle: rubbed-in lard for tenderness, a couple of folds of butter for lift, which is what a later kitchen would call rough puff. The combination of lard and butter was standard in American pastry into the mid-twentieth century, lard being cheap, plentiful from home hog-killing and prized for shortness, butter contributing flavour and browning. The instruction to keep the finished paste out of contact with the ice dates the book firmly to the icebox rather than the refrigerator, when cold storage meant a chest with a block of ice in it and food had to be kept from the meltwater.