Chopped Paste
2 cups flour 2 tablespoons lard ⅔ cup butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Cold water Wash butter. Mix salt with flour, put in chopping tray, add lard and butter, and chop until well mixed. Moisten to a dough with cold water. Toss on floured cloth (Magic Cover), pat, and roll out. Fold so as to make three layers, turn half-way round, pat, and roll out; repeat. Should the butter be too hard, it will not mix readily with the flour, in which case the result will be a tough crust. Omit lard, and use all butter, if preferred.
A short, flaky pie pastry made by chopping the fat into the flour rather than rubbing it in by hand, then given a few quick rolls and folds. It behaves like any all-butter or butter-and-lard crust and rewards cold ingredients and a light hand.
- Keep everything coldThe recipe's own warning is inverted: butter that is too hard will not distribute, but butter that is warm will smear and the crust will be tough and greasy. Aim for butter firm but yielding, straight from the refrigerator and cut into small pieces, with ice water for moistening.
- "Wash butter"Nineteenth-century butter was often salty and wet, so cooks kneaded it under cold water to rinse out brine and buttermilk. Modern unsalted butter needs none of this; skip the step and reduce nothing.
- The chopping trayA wooden tray and curved chopper were standard equipment. A pastry blender, two knives, or a few short pulses in a food processor do the same job. Stop while pieces of fat the size of peas remain.
- Water quantityNone is given because flour absorbs unpredictably. Expect roughly 5 to 7 tablespoons of ice water for 2 cups of flour, added a tablespoon at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed.
- Rest before rollingThe original goes straight from mixing to rolling. Half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and firms the fat, which makes the folding easier and the baked crust more tender.
- The foldsFolding in three, turning, and rolling again is a shortened puff-pastry turn. Note that the recipe says to "turn half-way round" -- a half turn, not the quarter turn used in standard puff pastry. Two turns as written give a crust noticeably flakier than a plain rolled pastry.
- Yield and bakingTwo cups of flour makes enough for a double-crust 9-inch pie or two single shells. Blind-bake shells at 425F for 12 to 15 minutes, weighted; a filled double-crust pie usually starts at 425F for 15 minutes and finishes at 350F.
- LardThe 2 tablespoons of lard, being nearly pure fat where butter carries water, shorten more efficiently than butter alone. Leaf lard is best if you can get it; the note that it may be omitted for all butter is sound, though the crust will be slightly firmer.
Chopped paste sits between the plain "paste" of everyday pie-making and the laborious puff paste that cookbooks of the period treat as a separate accomplishment. The chopping tray was ordinary American kitchen equipment, used for hash and mincemeat as much as pastry, and chopping rather than rubbing in the fat would have kept warm hands off the dough. The parenthetical "Magic Cover" appears to be a trade name for a pastry cloth or floured rolling cover. The instruction to wash butter is a reminder that butter then could be a variable, sometimes salted, farm-supplied ingredient rather than the standardized block a cook buys now.