Plain Paste
1½ cups flour 1/4 cup lard 1/4 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon salt.
Cold water Wash butter, pat, and form in circular piece. Add salt to flour, and work in lard with tips of fingers or case knife. Moisten to dough with cold water; ice-water is not an essential, but is desirable in summer. Toss on board dredged sparingly with flour, pat, and roll out; fold in butter as for puff paste, pat, and roll out. Fold so as to make three layers, turn half-way round, pat, and roll out; repeat. The pastry may be used at once; if not, fold in cheese-cloth, put in covered tin, and keep in cold place, but never in direct contact with ice. Plain paste requires a moderate oven. This is superior paste.
Fannie Farmer's everyday pie crust, built on half lard and half butter and given two rounds of folding to borrow some of the flake of puff paste. Most of what needs translating here is equipment and vocabulary rather than technique.
- The hinge: keep the butter cold and in sheetsThe lard is rubbed in to make the dough tender; the butter is folded in whole so that it stays in layers. If the butter softens and blends during rolling, the pastry loses its flake and becomes merely short. Chill the dough 20 minutes between the two rolling sequences if the kitchen is warm.
- "Wash butter"Butter of the period was salted and still held buttermilk, and working it under cold water to rinse these out was a common practice. With modern unsalted butter this step is unnecessary; simply pat a cold quarter-cup into a flat round.
- "Case knife"A plain table knife with a blade, as opposed to a carving or paring knife. A pastry blender or two forks do the same job of cutting lard into flour.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no numbers; a moderate oven is conventionally taken as roughly 350-375F. That suits a filled pie baked through slowly; for a crust baked blind, or a wet filling where a soggy bottom is the risk, modern practice is often to start at 425F for the first 15 minutes and then drop the heat.
- Cold water, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity because flour absorbency varied. Expect about 4 to 5 tablespoons for this amount of flour, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just holds together.
- LardLeaf lard or good rendered pork fat gives the tenderness intended here. Shelf-stable hydrogenated lard behaves differently and is blander; an equal weight of shortening is closer in handling, though it will not taste the same.
- "Never in direct contact with ice"A warning aimed at the icebox, where dough resting against the block would sweat and turn the flour gummy. In a refrigerator, wrap the dough in plastic rather than cheesecloth and keep it a day or two at most.
- YieldAbout 12 oz of dough: one generous 9-inch single crust, a modest two-crust 8-inch pie, or a dozen small tart shells.
"Paste" is the older English word for pastry dough, surviving in "puff paste" long after "pie crust" had taken over elsewhere, and Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook-Book (1896) organizes its pastry chapter as a ladder from this plain paste up through puff paste, each one adding fat and folds. The half-lard, half-butter formula pairs lard for tenderness with butter for flavor and browning, since neither alone did both. The instruction to fold butter in as for puff paste marks this as a step above the ordinary rubbed-in crust, which is why she closes with the flat, confident verdict "This is superior paste." The storage note, with its caution about the ice, is a reminder that a well-off Boston household in the 1890s would likely have kept food cold with a delivered block of ice and had to think about where in the box a thing could safely sit.