Quick Paste
1 1/2 cups flour 3/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup lard, crisco, or cottolene Cold water Mix salt with flour, cut in shortening with knife. Moisten to dough with cold water. Toss on floured board, pat, roll out, and roll up like a jelly roll. Use one-third cup of shortening if a richer paste is desired.
A lean, quickly made pie pastry with an unusual finishing step: the rolled sheet is rolled up on itself, which lays down crude layers and gives a flakier result than a plain patted dough. A few of the fats named are no longer on the shelf.
- The hinge: keep everything coldWith only a quarter cup of fat to a cup and a half of flour, this dough has little margin. If the shortening softens and blends smoothly into the flour, there is nothing left to make flakes. Cut it in only until the pieces are pea-sized, add ice water a tablespoon at a time, and stop the moment the mass holds together.
- Cottolene and lardCottolene was a shortening made from cottonseed oil blended with beef fat, heavily advertised in the 1890s and long since discontinued. Any solid vegetable shortening stands in for it; lard, especially leaf lard, is generally preferred for tenderness.
- "Paste" means pastry doughThrough the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, paste was the standard word for pie and tart dough. Nothing is being cooked to a paste here.
- The jelly-roll turnRolling the sheet up like a jelly roll is a shortcut version of laminating. After rolling it up, chill the cylinder for 20 to 30 minutes, then cut it crosswise into rounds or press it flat and roll out again for the pan; the spiral of fat and flour becomes the flaking.
- Water quantityThe original leaves this open, as period books usually did. Expect 3 to 4 tablespoons of ice water for this much flour, depending on the day's humidity.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch crust, with a little over for a lattice or a few small tart shells. Increase by about half again for a double-crust pie.
- Baking, since no oven is givenFor a filled fruit pie, start at 425F for 15 minutes and drop to 350F to finish. For an empty shell, prick and weight it and bake at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes until dry and pale gold.
- The richer versionOne-third cup of shortening is the more forgiving proportion and closer to modern practice. The leaner quarter-cup dough is drier to handle and easier to toughen with overworking.
Recipes titled "quick paste" or "plain paste" commonly opened the pastry chapter in American household books of the early twentieth century, standing in contrast to the laborious puff paste of folded butter that followed. This one sits at an interesting moment in fat history: it names lard alongside Crisco and Cottolene, branded shortenings that were then displacing animal fat in American kitchens. Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil and beef-fat shortening advertised hard in the 1890s, and Crisco, a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil product introduced in 1911, were both sold on the claim that vegetable fat was cleaner and more digestible than lard, and cookbooks of the period often listed the fats as interchangeable. The jelly-roll rolling trick is a domestic compromise, generally understood as a way to get some of the layering of puff paste without the long chilling and folding that a proper one demands.