Pastry
Sift together 2 cups flour, 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder, 1 teaspoon salt; rub in very lightly 1 tablespoon shortening; add just enough cold water to make a stiff dough. Roll out one half on floured board and line the bottom of dish. Roll out other half and put over the top.
This is a lean, baking-powder crust meant to cap a meat pie rather than a flaky short pastry. It behaves more like a rolled biscuit dough, and it wants to be handled accordingly.
- Read the fat correctlyOne tablespoon of shortening to two cups of flour is a fraction of what a short crust carries. Do not expect flakiness; expect a firm, bready lid that soaks up gravy. Rubbing the fat in "very lightly" is the whole of the technique.
- How much water"Just enough cold water to make a stiff dough" is likely somewhere around 1/2 to 2/3 cup for two cups of flour, though the flour will decide it. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly rough; baking powder doughs toughen quickly with overworking.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons to two cups of flour is at the generous end of usual leavening rates, then and now. Any double-acting baking powder will do; Royal is the brand the recipe itself names.
- Roll thicker than pie crustAt about a quarter inch this dough handles well and holds its shape over a wet filling. Rolled thin it tears, because there is not enough fat to lubricate the gluten.
- The bottom crustAn unfat-enriched bottom crust under a stew filling will go pasty. Either blind-bake the lined dish at 425F for 10 minutes before filling, or skip the bottom the recipe calls for and use the dough as a lid only.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given because it belongs to whatever pie it covers. For a meat pie with a cooked, hot filling, 425F for 25 to 30 minutes browns the crust without drying it. Cut two or three vents in the top before it goes in.
- YieldEnough for a top and bottom on one 9-inch pie dish, or a generous lid on a deep 2-quart baking dish; four to six servings depending on the filling.
Royal Baking Powder issued a long series of free and cheap cookbooks from the late nineteenth century onward, and their purpose was frankly commercial: every recipe that could plausibly take baking powder took it, in measured spoonfuls of the company's product. A chemically leavened pie crust is a good example. Traditional English meat pies used suet or lard pastry, but a baking-powder dough was faster, forgiving in inexperienced hands, and thrifty with fat, working with a single tablespoon of shortening. Crusts of this type are often seen as forerunners of the biscuit-topped pot pies and cobblers still common in American home cooking, and the recipe was understood as a component of a savory dish, not a pastry in its own right.