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Plain Pastry
21/2 CUPS PASTRY FLOUR I TEASPOON SALT I CUP SHORTENING 3 TABLESPOONS COLD WATER (ABOUT) Mix flour and salt. Break shortening into small pieces, drop into flour, then use 2 knives or a steel fork and cut shortening into flour until mixture forms crumbs about the size of peas. Add water 1 teaspoon at a time, dropping it into the driest place each time and gently working wetted crumbs together. Try to have water well enough distributed without using more than 3 tablespoons, but if you have not been clever enough to do this you will have to add more. Gather the mixture into a ball and press together gently. Keep in a cool place over night. Roll 1/8 inch thick. Makes two 2-crust pies 9 inches in diameter.
In a camp where there is no ice, it is always best to make pastry out of vegetable shortening that stays firm enough to work well without being chilled-such as Crisco-and to do the preliminaries at the cool end of the day. If you have a box with a tight fitting cover sunk in the earth above a stream or spring where you keep milk and butter, it will also chill the pastry sufficiently to make it flaky. We do several camp tricks in pie making when conditions are primitive. First, instead of molding the dough into a ball, we divide the dough in 4 portions without handling it too much. Two portions are calculated to make the under crusts, and two slightly smaller portions are for the upper crusts. Then we pat and gently press each portion into a round about 5 inches in diameter, wrap the rounds separately in paraffin paper, or lay them in separate plates, to cool. When time arrives for rolling out the pies, part of the work is already done and they turn out flakier besides. We have discovered, too, that the best of all camp rolling pins is a well corked bottle filled with cold or ice water, and that any rough table is as good as a proper pastry board if a well floured cloth is used to roll the pie out on.
Of course hot water pastry is better under some camping conditions, and here is the standard recipe for two 2-crust pies:
A straightforward all-shortening pie crust, written for a cook working without refrigeration. The camp technique in the second half — dividing the dough into four flat rounds rather than one ball — is worth adopting in any kitchen.
- The quantitiesThe flour is 2 1/2 cups pastry flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 cup shortening, about 3 tablespoons cold water. Pastry flour runs about 8-9 percent protein; substitute all-purpose and pull back roughly 2 tablespoons per cup, or use half all-purpose and half cake flour.
- The hingeWater goes in a teaspoon at a time, always onto the driest patch, and the crumbs are pressed rather than stirred. Overworking after the water is in develops gluten and gives a crust that shrinks and toughens; the dough should look barely cohesive when you stop.
- Fat to flour ratioA full cup of shortening to 2 1/2 cups flour is a rich crust by modern standards — a little more fat by weight than the usual 2:3. It will be tender and short rather than layered, and it tolerates rough handling better than an all-butter dough.
- Crisco then and nowThe Crisco of this period was hydrogenated cottonseed oil and stayed firm at ambient temperature. Vegetable shortening today has been reformulated to cut trans fats and is generally reckoned to soften more readily; keep it properly cold, and chill the flour too if the kitchen is warm.
- Overnight restThe instruction to keep it cool overnight is not merely for firmness — the resting hydrates the flour evenly and relaxes what gluten has formed. Two hours in the refrigerator will do if you are pressed, but the overnight version rolls out noticeably more willingly.
- The four-round trickPatting the dough into four 5-inch discs instead of one ball is the most useful thing on this page. The dough chills through in a fraction of the time and needs far less rolling, which is where toughness usually creeps in.
- Paraffin paperParaffin paper is waxed paper. Plastic wrap does the same job and seals better against drying.
- BakingThe original gives no oven guidance because it depends on the filling. For a blind-baked shell, 425F for 12-15 minutes with weights, then 10 minutes more uncovered; a filled two-crust pie generally starts at 425F for 20 minutes and finishes at 350F.
- YieldTwo 9-inch double-crust pies, rolled to 1/8 inch. Halve everything for a single pie.
Plain pastry — flour, salt, solid fat, cold water and nothing else — was the workhorse crust of American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward, distinguished in the books from puff paste, which was built by folding butter into dough in layers. What dates this particular version is the shortening. Lard and butter were the standard pie fats until hydrogenated vegetable shortening arrived in the 1910s, and by the interwar years cookbooks were recommending it by brand name, partly on grounds of price and keeping quality and partly, as here, because it held its shape at room temperature. That last property is exactly why an outdoor cookery book reaches for it: the whole difficulty of making pastry in a camp is keeping the fat solid, and the author's spring-box cooler and water-filled bottle rolling pin are improvisations around the same problem that a refrigerator solves indoors.