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Entire Wheat Paste
1 cup fine Entire Wheat Flour 1/2 cup pastry flour 1 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons lard 1/2 cup butter Cold water Make same as Plain Paste. Roll to one-fourth inch in thickness, cut in finger-shaped pieces, bake, cool, brush over with slightly beaten white one egg diluted with one teaspoon cold water, and sprinkle with chopped nut meat seasoned with salt. Return to oven to slightly brown nut meats. Serve with salad course.
These are savory pastry fingers meant to accompany a salad course, not a pie crust. The method is Fannie Farmer's Plain Paste, so the page assumes you have already read that recipe a few pages earlier.
- The hinge: keep everything coldPlain Paste depends on the fat staying in solid flakes until it hits the oven. Cut the lard and butter into the flour with a pastry blender or the fingertips until the pieces are pea-sized, add ice water a tablespoon at a time until the dough just holds, and chill before rolling. Whole wheat flour absorbs more water than white, so expect to need slightly more than you would for a plain crust.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat, and "fine" means finely milled rather than the coarse graham grind sold alongside it in 1896. Modern whole wheat pastry flour is the closest match; standard whole wheat will work but gives a heavier, more crumbly finger.
- Pastry flourA soft, low-protein white flour, roughly 8-9 percent. All-purpose will do here since the dough is short and the pieces are small, though the result is a shade tougher.
- LardRendered leaf lard, not the hydrogenated block sold in supermarket baking aisles. If you can only find the shelf-stable kind, all butter gives a better flavor for something served with salad.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none, and the recipe names no oven term to translate. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, suits pastry rolled this thin; work by eye, taking the fingers out when set and pale gold, and give the nut-browning return trip only a few minutes, as chopped nuts scorch quickly.
- Trailing measurementsThe '2 cups flour, 1/4 cup lard' at the end is a stray fragment from an adjoining recipe on the page, not part of this one. Ignore it.
- Nut meatsUnspecified in the original; pecans, walnuts or almonds all suit. Chop them fine so they adhere to the egg wash, and salt them before sprinkling rather than after.
- Yield and servingThe recipe specifies only quarter-inch thickness and finger-shaped pieces; a cup and a half of flour should give something on the order of two to three dozen. Like most thin savory pastry they are likely best the day they are baked; crisp them briefly in a low oven if held overnight.
Whole wheat baking had a moral dimension in late nineteenth-century America. Sylvester Graham's mid-century campaign for unbolted flour left a long tail, and by the time the Boston Cooking School Cook Book appeared in 1896 "entire wheat" products were sold as the wholesome, digestible option for households that thought about such things. Fannie Farmer, trained in the scientific-cookery tradition of the school, treats it matter-of-factly as one flour among several rather than as a health cure. The dish itself belongs to the formal dinner service of the period, where a salad course arrived late in the meal and wanted something crisp and savory beside it in place of bread: cheese straws, wafers, or fingers like these. Serving the pastry with nuts and salt rather than sugar marks it clearly as part of the savory progression, not a dessert.