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Pastry
¾ lb. (3 cups) flour ½ lb. (1 cup) lard 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 gill (1/2 cup) ice-water Mix the flour and salt together in an earthenware bowl, then mix in the lard by cutting it in with a knife. Add the ice-water, and mix as little as possible. Roll the pastry out on a floured baking board.
It should be handled as little as possible.
I lb. (4 cups) flour 1 lb. (2 cups) butter 1 egg yolk
A plain short-crust in the English manner, given by weight with cup equivalents. The proportions that matter are three parts flour to one part fat by cup measure, bound with as little ice-water as will hold it.
- The weights and cups disagreeThe printed weights are corrupt — '34 lb.' and '1½ lb.' are almost certainly ¾ lb. flour and ½ lb. lard, which agree with the cup figures (3 cups flour ≈ 12–13 oz, 1 cup lard ≈ 7–8 oz). Either way, work from the cup measures: 3 cups flour to 1 cup lard.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe itself notes. Treat it as a maximum rather than a fixed quantity — flours vary in thirst, and you want the dough only just cohering.
- Handle it as little as possibleThis is the hinge, and the recipe says it twice. Every extra turn of the hands develops gluten and warms the fat; both make the crust tough rather than short.
- LardMuch retail shelf-stable lard is hydrogenated and behaves differently from the soft leaf lard of the period. Rendered leaf lard, sold at some butchers and farm markets, gives the flaking the recipe expects; all-butter or a butter-lard mix also works, kept very cold.
- Cutting in with a knifeTwo knives, a pastry blender or a food processor pulsed a few times all do the job. Stop while pieces of fat the size of small peas remain visible.
- Rest before rollingThe original does not mention chilling. Half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and firms the fat, and makes the rolling out far easier.
- BakingNo temperature is given. Pastry of this kind wants a hot oven — roughly 400–425F — so the water in the dough turns to steam before the fat melts out. Blind-bake shells with weights for about 15 minutes, judging by colour.
- YieldEnough for a double-crust 9-inch pie, or two single shells.
A short pastry section is a common feature of early twentieth-century cookery books, and a cook capping pies and puddings needed a reliable crust. The three-to-one flour-to-fat ratio here is a standard English short paste, and lard remained a common household fat well into the twentieth century: cheap, often rendered at home from pork fat, and valued for the short, crumbling texture it gives. The call for an earthenware bowl and ice-water reflects the difficulty of keeping fat cold in a kitchen without mechanical refrigeration.