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General Rules
1. Use pastry flour. 2. Use cold ingredients, cold board, and the room should be cool. 3. Employ little mixing, kneading toughens. (a) (b) (c) Flour plus air equals "light" mixture Flour plus lard equals "flaky" mixture Flour plus water equals "tough" mixture 4. Flour toughens: Use as little as possible. 5. Part of shortening may be enclosed during rolling process to make crust flaky. 6. Roll pastry one way. 7. Cook pastry in a hot oven and have the greatest heat at the bottom so that it may rise before it browns. 8. Pastry is difficult to digest because the starch grains must absorb water and swell before they can be digested. The small amount of water used in making pastry does not furnish enough liquid to accomplish this. Moreover, the particles of starch are enclosed in fat and digestive fluids can not reach starch readily. 9. To prevent bottom crust from absorbing the juice, brush crust with flour or white of egg. 10. Never grease a pie tin. 11. To a juicy pie add one-sixth as much flour as sugar. 12. Fats: (1) Lard makes white flaky crust; (2) Lard and butter give good flavor. Pie crust is often made without baking powder, but it requires much skill and practice as well as more shortening to make it tender and flaky. And when a plainer, easier made, and more economical crust is desired, the use of a little baking powder will produce the results required. If pastry flour is used the results will be found more satisfactory. 3 cups flour Powder PIE PASTE-No. 1 1/2 level teaspoon Calumet Baking 1 teaspoon salt 3/4 cup lard Cold water Sift together dry ingredients thoroughly. Work in lard with knife or rounding edge of a tablespoon or spatula. Moisten to a dough with cold water. Put lightly on floured board, and roll thin ready for use. 3 cups flour PIE PASTE-No. 2 1/2 level teaspoon Calumet Baking Powder 1/4 teaspoon salt cup lard 1/2 cup butter Cold water Sift dry ingredients together thoroughly. Work in lard. Mix into smooth paste; flour the board, roll thin. Spread butter on it evenly, fold in three; roll out thin again; fold in three, repeat twice more and use.
NOTE-A cup of sweet cream can be used in place of lard and water, when obtainable About 4 tart apples 1/2 cup sugar
A page of pastry principles followed by two working paste recipes. Most of the advice still holds; the oven directions, the flour, and the leftover Victorian nutrition need translating.
- Keep everything cold — this is the hingeRule 2 is the one that decides whether the crust is flaky or leathery. Chill the fat until firm, use ice water, and if the kitchen is warm rest the dough in the refrigerator between rolling and folding rather than pushing on.
- "Hot oven" with bottom heatRead that as 425–450F. The instruction to keep the greatest heat at the bottom reflects a coal or wood range; in an electric oven, bake on a preheated sheet pan or baking steel on a low rack to get the same effect on the bottom crust.
- Pastry flourRoughly 9 percent protein, between cake and all-purpose. If you cannot find it, use all-purpose but cut the mixing further, or replace a quarter of the all-purpose with cake flour.
- Calumet Baking PowderA double-acting phosphate-and-alum powder still sold today; any standard double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure. Half a teaspoon in three cups of flour is there for tenderness, not lift, and can be left out entirely if you want the classic all-butter-and-lard result.
- A missing quantity in No. 2The line reads "cup lard" with no amount — the original figure has dropped out of the text. Given the half cup of butter and three cups of flour, something in the range of a quarter to a half cup of lard is consistent with No. 1; the number as printed is not recoverable.
- The folding in No. 2This is rough puff. Fold in three, roll, and repeat, keeping the butter in visible streaks rather than working it smooth. If the butter begins to smear or leak, stop and chill for twenty minutes before continuing.
- Thickening juicy fillingsRule 11's one-sixth as much flour as sugar works out to about 4 teaspoons of flour per half cup of sugar. Cornstarch or tapioca give a clearer set with the same fruit; flour clouds slightly but is more forgiving of underbaking.
- Ungreased tin, sealed bottomRule 10 is correct: fat in the pan makes the crust fry and slump. Brushing the bottom with egg white, as in rule 9, still works, and so does a five-minute blind bake before the filling goes in.
- Ignore rule 8The digestion paragraph is period nutritional theory, not fact. Starch in baked pastry is gelatinized well enough by the water in the dough and the heat of the oven; fat slows gastric emptying but does not seal starch away from digestion.
- Yield and the stray filling lineThree cups of flour makes roughly enough for one double-crust 9-inch pie plus a spare shell, or two to three single shells. The "About 4 tart apples, 1/2 cup sugar" at the end appears to be the beginning of the pie recipe that follows, not part of the paste.
Reliable Recipes was a promotional cookbook published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, which is why a page on pie paste — a mixture traditionally made with no leavening at all — quietly recommends half a teaspoon of the sponsor's product and then explains at length why that is a sensible economy. The numbered rules themselves belong to the domestic-science movement of the same era, when cooking schools were recasting kitchen practice as applied chemistry: hence the flour-plus-air, flour-plus-lard, flour-plus-water formulas, and hence the confident paragraph on starch digestion, which reflects what was believed about pastry's heaviness around 1900 rather than anything now accepted. Lard is the default fat here because it was cheap, plentiful from the Chicago packing houses, and genuinely better at producing flakes than the butter most modern recipes reach for; the note that sweet cream may replace lard and water marks the recipe as coming from a period when a household might have cream on hand and shortening in a can was still a novelty.