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Chopped Paste
1½ cups flour 4 tablespoons lard 4 tablespoons butter ½ teaspoon salt cold water Sift salt and flour; add lard or butter when thoroughly chilled. Chop until like meal; add cold water to make a stiff dough. Chill; roll on a floured cloth or molding board into a rectangular shape; fold ends towards center, double, turn halfway round, and roll again.
This paste is a superior one. Chill before rolling for pies.
A half-puff pastry built by chopping cold fat into flour and giving the dough a single turn. The method is sound; the original just assumes you already know the parts it leaves out.
- "Paste" means pastry doughThroughout books of this period paste is the standard word for pie crust, from the French pâte. Nothing here is spread or ground.
- The fat is half the flour by volumeThe fat is a third of the flour by volume -- Four tablespoons lard plus four tablespoons butter is 1/2 cup of fat to 1 1/2 cups flour, a rich ratio. Note that the recipe lists both but then says "lard or butter" — the wording is ambiguous; using the full 8 tablespoons is the sensible reading. All butter works and tastes better; all lard is flakier.
- Water is unmeasured on purposeExpect roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons of ice water, added a spoonful at a time until the mass just coheres. "Stiff" here means firm and barely damp, not dry and cracking.
- Chop, do not rubThe fat must stay in visible flakes. A pastry blender or two knives, or a few pulses of a food processor, gets you to "like meal" — really coarse crumbs with pea-sized pieces still in them. Warm hands defeat the whole method.
- The fold is a lamination turnFolding the ends to the center, doubling, and turning the dough halfway round as directed is a book fold — one turn of rough puff. It is what makes the crust layered rather than merely short, and it is the step people skip. Chill again after the turn if the butter has softened at all.
- Floured clothA pastry cloth was standard equipment and still helps: it holds flour without letting the dough absorb much of it. A lightly floured counter is fine, but keep the flour sparing or the crust toughens.
- YieldAbout 12 oz of dough — one 9-inch single crust with enough left for a lattice, or a thin 9-inch double crust. Double the recipe for a generous two-crust pie.
- BakingNo temperature is given because the pie recipe it serves would supply one. For blind baking, chill the lined pan hard, line with weights, and start at 425F for 15 minutes before dropping to 350F to finish.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer that, like Baker's and Rumford, used a general cookbook to keep its name in American kitchens. That commercial origin explains the book's shape — the chocolate recipes are the point, but a complete household manual needed a reliable pastry, and this is it. The technique is a domesticated rough puff: rather than enclosing a block of butter as a French pâte feuilletée demands, the cook chops the fat in and gets layering from a single book fold. Half lard, half butter is often described as the typical American compromise of the period, lard for flake and butter for flavor, at a time when lard generally was a kitchen staple. The instruction to chop rather than rub, and to chill at every stage, is the same advice given today, and the author's flat claim that "this paste is a superior one" has held up better than most of the confident assertions in cookbooks of 1907.