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Plain Short Paste
2 pounds of flour. 1/2 pound of good lard, butter, drippings, or grated suet. 1 teaspoonful of salt. 1 pint of water.
A handful of flour more to roll out with.
Rub the lard into the flour dry, till thoroughly mixed. Put in the salt and all the water, work it up to a smooth paste, roll it out once like pie paste, fold it over and it is ready for use.
The water should always be poured into a hollow in the flour when making any kind of paste, and the flour drawn in rapidly but gradually while stirring with the fingers, otherwise the paste may be rough and lumpy and much working to correct the mistake will make it hard.
A lean, working pastry from a professional bakeshop manual — a quarter the fat of a modern short crust, scaled for a day's baking rather than a single pie. The technique note at the end is the real content of the recipe.
- Scale it downThe full batch is 2 lb flour (about 900 g) and yields roughly 3 1/2 lb of dough, enough for perhaps three double-crust 9-inch pies. A quarter batch — 8 oz flour, 2 oz fat, 1/4 tsp salt, 1/2 cup water — makes a single crust.
- A pint is 2 cupsAmerican measure: 1 pint of water to 2 lb flour is roughly 50 percent hydration, which is very wet by modern pastry standards. Hold back a few tablespoons and judge by feel.
- The hinge is the wellThe closing sentence is the point of the recipe. Make a hollow in the flour, pour the water in at once, and draw the dry flour in from the sides with your fingers while stirring. Dribbling water over the surface makes lumps, and the extra kneading needed to fix them develops gluten and turns the crust hard.
- This is not a flaky pasteAt 1 part fat to 4 parts flour, with the fat rubbed in dry and the dough rolled and folded only once, this is a sturdy crust for meat pies, deep pies and bottom crusts — not a rich short or puff paste. Expect firm and tender rather than crumbly.
- Drippings and suetGrated suet is the hard fat from around beef kidneys, sold at some butchers and by mail in shredded form. Drippings means saved roast fat, usually beef or bacon. Either gives a savory crust; lard is comparatively neutral, butter is not. All should be cold and firm when rubbed in.
- Rest before rollingThe original moves straight from mixing to use, which suits a shop working through dough fast. At home, wrap and chill 30 minutes so the flour hydrates fully and the gluten relaxes, or the crust will shrink down the sides of the pan.
- OvenNo temperature is given. A filled double-crust pie in this paste wants a hot start — 425F for the first 15 minutes to set and color the bottom — then 350F to finish. Blind-baked shells: 400F with weights.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of late nineteenth-century manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than housewives, and the quantities suit that: two pounds of flour at a time is a shop batch rather than a family one. "Short paste" is the old trade term for any pastry made short — that is, tender — by rubbing fat into flour so it coats the grains and limits gluten, as opposed to the laminated puff and rough pastes built by folding butter between layers. Calling it plain presumably marks it as one of the simpler and cheaper of the shop's doughs, and the string of interchangeable fats — lard, butter, drippings, grated suet — suggests a kitchen using whatever fat was to hand. Suet in pastry, once ordinary on both sides of the Atlantic, became much rarer in American baking as commercial lard and later shortening became cheap and uniform.