Quick Paste
Cold water 1/4 cup lard, crisco, or cottolene Mix salt with flour, cut in shortening with knife. Moisten to dough with cold water. Toss on floured board, pat, roll out, and roll up like a jelly roll. Use one-third cup of shortening if a richer paste is desired. 1½ cups flour ¾ teaspoon salt
A plain shortening pie crust, printed here with its ingredient list scrambled around the method — read it as 1½ cups flour, salt, ¼ cup shortening and about ¼ cup cold water. A few points make it behave.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe shortening should stay in visible flakes, not blend into the flour, and the water should be ice cold. Warm fat gives a mealy, tough crust rather than a flaky one.
- Water is a range, not a numberThe original gives no quantity for the water, only 'moisten to dough with cold water.' Add it a tablespoon at a time until the dough just coheres when pressed — flour absorbency varies.
- Cottolene and CriscoCottolene was a shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, sold in tubs; it is long gone. Crisco still exists but has been reformulated to remove trans fats and may not behave identically to the original. Any modern solid vegetable shortening, or lard, works.
- "Cut in with a knife"A pastry blender or two table knives worked scissor-fashion does this faster. Stop when the largest pieces are pea-sized.
- Rolling up like a jelly rollThis is a quick lamination — it builds a few layers without the folding and chilling of true puff paste. Roll the coil out again to fit the pan, and rest the dough 20–30 minutes in the refrigerator first so it does not shrink.
- YieldEnough for one 9-inch single crust, or a bottom crust and a narrow lattice. Double it for a two-crust pie.
- Baking blindThe original gives no temperature because the crust takes whatever the filling needs. For an empty shell, line and weight it and bake at 425°F until set and pale gold.
American bakers of the period were choosing between three fats: lard, long established; Cottolene, a cottonseed-oil-and-suet shortening marketed heavily from the 1890s; and Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911. Listing all three in a single line, as this recipe does, is a small snapshot of that transition — no preference is expressed, and they are treated as interchangeable by volume. The name "quick paste" distinguishes it from puff paste, which demanded repeated folding, chilling and a great deal of butter; the single jelly-roll turn here is a shortcut that gives some flakiness for a fraction of the labour. "Paste" for pie dough is the older English usage.