Home › Cakes › Half Puff-Paste for Fruit Pies
Half Puff-Paste for Fruit Pies
1/2 pound flour 2 ounces lard Pinch of salt Ice-water 4 ounces butter Sift the flour and salt; cut into it the lard; mix to a dough with cold water. Flour the pastry slab or pie board; turn out the paste; roll half an inch thick; sprinkle lightly with flour and roll again Lay on the butter; fold the crust over; roll as before; dust with flour; fold and roll again. Repeat the process once more; set in a cool place for half an hour or longer; give another roll and the paste is ready for use. It should make four single crusts.
A rough puff — half the butter of a full puff paste, folded in as a single slab rather than laminated in many turns. Everything depends on keeping the butter cold and distinct from the dough.
- Weights in cups1/2 pound flour is about 2 cups of all-purpose, measured by scooping and levelling; weigh it if you can, since flour packs unevenly. 2 ounces lard is 1/4 cup, and 4 ounces butter is one stick.
- The hinge: cold butter, in one pieceThe butter is laid on the rolled dough as a slab or in flattened pieces, not rubbed in. Take it straight from the refrigerator and pound or roll it flat between paper so it is pliable but still cold. If it softens and blends into the flour during the turns, you get shortcrust rather than flake.
- Ice-water means ice-waterThe ingredient list calls for ice-water even though the method says only cold water. Set a cup of water over ice while you cut in the lard, and add it a spoonful at a time — enough to bring the dough together and no more.
- Turns and restingThree fold-and-roll cycles is all this paste asks, and half an hour of chilling between the last fold and the final roll is a minimum, not a target. If the kitchen is warm, chill for 20 minutes after each turn instead.
- "Roll half an inch thick"That is the working thickness during the folding stage. The final roll for a pie shell should be about 1/8 inch.
- Pastry slabA marble slab was prized because it stays cold. A chilled sheet pan turned upside down, or simply a countertop wiped with cold water and dried, serves the same purpose.
- YieldFour single crusts, as stated. The recipe gives no pan size, and half a pound of flour will only stretch that far if the paste is rolled thin. The dough can be frozen wrapped tight; thaw in the refrigerator before the final roll.
- Baking, since the recipe gives noneFruit pies on this paste want a hot start to set the layers: 425F for the first 15 to 20 minutes, then down to 350F until the filling bubbles thickly, roughly 40 to 50 minutes in total for a filled 9-inch pie.
Early twentieth-century American cookbooks routinely graded pastry by richness — full puff paste with butter equal to the flour, "half puff" with roughly half that, and plain pie paste below both — and expected the cook to match the grade to the job. The pairing of lard for tenderness with butter for flavor and lift was standard practice long before commercial shortening displaced both, and the lard here is deliberately cut into the flour while the butter is kept whole, so that each fat does a different job. Pastry, cake and dessert work were often filed together as the baker's department of the kitchen.