Paste
1½ cups flour (sifted) 1/2 cup lard 1/2 teaspoon salt 3½ tablespoons cold water Sift the flour and salt, then cut in the shortening with two knives until it looks mealy. Add the water gradually, cutting it in with a knife. Flour the bottom of the pan; roll out the crust and line the bottom of the pan with it. Trim off the edges; roll them out; form into a long strip and press around the edge of the crust, moistening it slightly with water first to make the dough adhere. Fill and bake in a quick oven, having the greatest heat at the bottom. A gas stove is more satisfactory for pies than a coal stove. The recipe makes two single crusts.
A plain lard pie paste, given in the terse style of a card-file cookbook. It works exactly as written; the only things needing translation are the oven and the fat.
- "A quick oven"425-450F. For an unfilled shell, blind bake at 425F; for a filled fruit pie, start at 425F and drop to 350-375F once the crust has set.
- Heat at the bottomThe instruction to keep the greatest heat below is about setting the bottom crust before the filling soaks in. In a modern oven, bake on the lowest rack, ideally on a preheated sheet pan or baking steel.
- LardLeaf lard, or good rendered pork fat, gives the tender short texture this recipe assumes. Shortening substitutes cup for cup; butter does not, since it carries water and will need a touch less liquid.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of any cut-in paste. Chilled fat and cold water, worked only until the mixture looks mealy, as the recipe directs, is what keeps the crust tender. Overworking to a smooth uniform paste gives a hard crust.
- Water is a guide, not a ruleThree and a half tablespoons suits average flour on an average day. Add it a spoonful at a time and stop when the dough just holds together when squeezed.
- Rest before rollingNot in the original, but worth doing: half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and makes the paste roll without springing back or tearing.
- The edge stripRolling the trimmings into a long strip and pressing it around the rim builds up a sturdier edge. Moisten it with water first, as directed, or it may lift away in the oven.
- YieldThe recipe says two single crusts; that is generous only for small (8-inch) pans, or it can be used as one double crust. Half the batch is roughly 6 oz of dough.
Lard paste was the American standard for pie, and vegetable shortening began to displace it after Crisco's introduction in 1911, though the changeover took decades. Lard's relatively large fat crystals stay solid while the dough is handled, then melt into flat pockets that help lift the layers apart. The aside that "a gas stove is more satisfactory for pies than a coal stove" points to the early decades of the twentieth century, when gas ranges were spreading through urban kitchens. The insistence on bottom heat reflects older practice, when the placement of the pie relative to the fire was one of the few oven controls a cook had. "Paste" is the older English term for pie dough, from the same root as "pastry."