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Paste with Lard
1/3 cup lard Cold water Mix salt with flour. Reserve one and one-fourth tablespoons lard, work in remainder to flour, using tips of fingers or a case knife. Moisten to a dough with water. Toss on a floured board, pat, and roll out. Spread with one tablespoon reserved lard, dredge with flour, roll up like a jelly roll, pat, and roll out; again roll up. Cut from the end of roll a piece large enough to line a pie plate. Pat and roll out, keeping the paste as circular in form as possible. With care and experience there need be no trimmings. Workedover pastry is never as satisfactory. The remaining onefourth tablespoon lard is used to dot over upper crust of pie just before sending to oven; this gives the pie a flaky appearance. Ice-water has a similar effect. If milk is brushed over the pie it has a glazed appearance. This quantity of paste will make one pie with two crusts and a few puffs, or two pies with one crust where the rim is built up and fluted.
A plain lard pastry built by the rolling-in method, so it laminates like a rough puff rather than a simple short crust. Note that the ingredient list as printed here gives only the lard and water; the flour and salt lines have dropped out.
- The missing quantitiesThe original ingredient list is incomplete, and the amounts of flour and salt cannot be recovered from the text itself. Fannie Farmer's plain pastes of this era run roughly 1 1/2 cups flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt to 1/3 cup fat; treat that as an inference, not the book's own figure.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe reserved tablespoon of lard is spread on the rolled sheet and folded in, which is what makes the crust flaky rather than merely short. If the lard softens and merges into the dough, the layers vanish. Chill the dough between the two roll-ups if the kitchen is warm.
- Case knifeA case knife is an ordinary table knife, used here in a cutting motion to break the fat into the flour. A pastry blender or two knives does the same work; the recipe offers fingertips as the alternative, though fingers warm the fat more than a knife does.
- DredgeTo dredge is simply to dust lightly with flour from a shaker or sieve, not to coat heavily. Too much loose flour between the layers makes the baked crust dry and grey.
- Lard itselfModern shelf-stable lard is often hydrogenated and behaves more like shortening. Leaf lard or rendered pork fat from a butcher gives the tender, slightly savoury crust the book expects.
- WaterThe recipe calls for cold water, added a little at a time until the dough just coheres; ice-water appears only as a wash brushed over the crust. The warning about worked-over pastry is usually explained today in terms of gluten: rerolled scraps have been developed and tend to bake tough and shrink in the plate.
- OvenThe recipe gives none, and the book supplies no temperature for this paste. As modern guidance, a filled two-crust pie is usually started hot, around 425F, to set the layers before the fat runs, then dropped to about 350F to finish; an unfilled shell can be blind-baked hot.
- YieldOne double-crust pie plus a few small puffs, or two single crusts with built-up fluted rims. The recipe does not state the size of the pie plate.
Lard was a common default pie fat in American kitchens well into the twentieth century, cheap, plentiful from the household pig or the local butcher, and valued for tenderness. The Boston Cooking-School book prints several pastes together, from plain lard paste up through butter pastes and puff paste, so that a cook could choose according to the pie and the purse. Rolling in a reserved portion of fat is a domestic shortcut in the direction of puff paste, with far fewer turns than a true puff paste requires. The remark that careful work leaves no trimmings fits the school's general emphasis on economy and precision.