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Plain Pastry
Pastry for one custard or pie: 1 cup flour. 2 tablespoons crisco or butter. 1/2 teaspoon salt and a little sugar.
Sift flour, salt and sugar, cut in shortening with knife. Mix lightly with ice water. Fold and chill.
Cream pastry can be used for dumplings and rolls of all kinds.
A single-crust shortcrust in four lines, with the proportions left partly to the cook's judgment. A few numbers fill in the gaps.
- YieldOne cup of flour makes one bottom crust for an 8- or 9-inch pie or custard, rolled thin. Double everything for a covered pie.
- The fat is leanTwo tablespoons of shortening per cup of flour is roughly a third or less of what most modern pastry recipes use. Expect a firm, slightly bready crust rather than a flaky one; if you want flake, go to 1/3 to 1/2 cup fat per cup of flour and accept a more fragile dough.
- Water quantityNone is given. Start with 2 tablespoons of ice water for one cup of flour and add by the teaspoon only until the dough just holds when pressed. Overwatering is what makes this style of crust tough.
- "A little sugar"Read this as 1/2 teaspoon. It is there for browning, not sweetness, and can be left out entirely for a savory shell.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, sold since 1911 and still on shelves in a reformulated, non-trans-fat version. It behaves much like the original for pastry; butter gives more flavor and a slightly harder dough when cold.
- Fold and chillThis is the instruction that matters. A single fold laminates the dough lightly, and 30 minutes in the refrigerator lets the flour hydrate and the fat firm up so the crust holds its shape instead of slumping.
- BakingNo oven is specified because the filling dictates it. For a blind-baked shell, line and weight it and bake at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, then a few minutes more uncovered until dry and pale gold.
- "Cream pastry"The closing sentence is ambiguous. It may point to a different, richer pastry given elsewhere rather than to the dough above; nothing in this entry settles the question.
Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal before collecting her columns into a cookbook generally dated to around 1920, and her style is visible here: terse, proportional, and written for a cook who already knows what pastry should feel like. The two tablespoons of shortening may well reflect the period as much as the author "war economy" baking of 1917-1919 pushed fat and sugar down hard, and it is a plausible reading that many of the lean proportions stuck in print afterward. Crisco, named in the recipe, had been on the market since 1911 and was heavily promoted through free recipe booklets, which is why brand names turn up in cookbooks of this decade where an earlier writer would have written only "lard" or "shortening."