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Rich Pastry
2 cups pastry flour 1/2 teaspoon Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2/3 cup shortening cold water Sift flour, baking powder and salt; add one-half shortening and rub in lightly with fingers; add water slowly until of right consistency to roll out. Divide in halves; roll out one half thin; put on in small pieces half remaining shortening; fold upper and lower edges in to center; fold sides in to center; fold sides to center again; roll out thin and put on pie plate. Repeat with other half for top crust.
A rough puff pastry from a baking-powder company pamphlet: half the fat is rubbed in, half is dotted on and folded through to make layers. A few points make it behave.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the recipe is that the dotted-on shortening stays in distinct pieces through the folding. If it smears into the dough the layers collapse and you get a short crust rather than a flaky one. Chill the dough 20-30 minutes before the final roll if the kitchen is warm.
- ShorteningIn American usage of this period the word generally meant a solid fat: lard or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, though butter was sometimes covered by the term too. Modern shortening is reformulated without trans fats and is slightly softer; butter can be substituted, but it carries water, browns faster and needs colder handling.
- Pastry flourA soft, low-protein flour around 8-9% protein. All-purpose works, but the crust will be a little tougher; a mix of roughly 3 parts all-purpose to 1 part cake flour is closer.
- The baking powderHalf a teaspoon in a pie crust is a house advertisement as much as a technique. It puffs the dough slightly and is not structurally necessary; leaving it out gives a perfectly good crust.
- "Cold water"No quantity is given because flour absorbency varies. Expect roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons for 2 cups of flour, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds together when pressed.
- The foldingThe instruction to fold the edges in to the centre, and then the sides in twice, is a series of book-style folds in the general manner of rough puff. Roll in one direction, keep the edges square, and brush off loose flour between turns.
- Yield and bakingEnough for one double-crust 9-inch pie. The recipe gives no baking instructions; a fruit pie in a crust like this is usually started hot, around 425-450F for the first 15 minutes, then dropped to 350-375F to finish.
- Blind bakingIf the filling is uncooked custard or cream, line and weight the shell; this dough puffs enthusiastically and will lift off the plate otherwise.
This comes from a promotional cookbook issued by a baking powder manufacturer -- the recipe names Royal Baking Powder outright -- a genre that flourished in the United States from the 1880s through the 1930s: free or cheap booklets of reliable recipes, each quietly requiring the sponsor's product. The tell here is the half teaspoon of baking powder in a pie crust, where chemical leavening does very little that folded fat is not already doing. The method itself is older than the pamphlet, a domestic shortcut version of the classic laminated pastry known in English kitchens as rough puff or "half puff," in which the fat is worked in in stages rather than enclosed as a single block. Shortening or lard was commonly used in place of butter in American kitchens, both for economy and because hydrogenated shortening, on the market from the early twentieth century, stayed workable at kitchen temperature in a way butter did not.