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Puff Paste
One quart of flour, one pint of butter, or butter and lard half and half, a pinch of salt, one and one-quarter cupfuls of cold water. Sprinkle the salt in the flour and with the hands mix in quickly the shortening until all is smooth. Mix the cold water quickly as possible and roll out and fit to a pie plate. The flour on the crust is all that is needed to prevent the crust from sticking; cut off evenly around the edge of plate-gather up the scraps and make another sheet for the top of the pie and roll out the upper sheet a little thinner than the under crust, lap one half over the other and cut four or five small slits at the center. Fill the pie with prepared filling, wet the edge of the rim to prevent the juices from running out, lay the upper crust across the center of the pie, turn back the half that is lapped, slightly press the edges down with your thumb, dipping occasionally into flour to prevent sticking. Bake to a light brown.
Despite the name, this is not laminated puff pastry with folded butter layers -- it is a very rich rubbed-in pie dough, and it behaves like one. The proportions are generous enough to make several pies.
- The measures in modern termsA quart of flour is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb (450 g). A pint of butter means a pint by volume, 2 cups or 1 lb, so this is equal weights of fat and flour -- about twice the fat of a standard American pie crust. The half-and-half butter-and-lard option is often held to give a flakier result, though the recipe treats the two as interchangeable.
- Scale it downAs written this makes enough for two to three double-crust nine-inch pies. Quartering it (1 cup flour, 4 oz fat, a scant 5 tablespoons water) gives a single crust.
- Keep everything cold"Mix in quickly" is the hinge of the whole method. With this much fat, warm hands will smear it into the flour and the crust will be short and sandy rather than flaky. Note that the recipe asks you to work the fat in "until all is smooth" rather than leaving visible lumps. Working fast helps, and chilling the dough 30 minutes before rolling is a modern insurance policy the original does not call for.
- The water is a maximum, not a targetOne and a quarter cups for a quart of flour is on the wet side for so rich a dough. Add it a few tablespoons at a time and stop as soon as the dough coheres; modern flour may absorb water differently from what the writer had.
- "Bake to a light brown"Start at 425F to set the crust and drive the steam out of the fat, then drop to 350F once the edges colour. Total time for a filled fruit pie runs 45-55 minutes; the underside is done when the juices bubble thickly through the slits.
- The folded top crustLapping the upper sheet in half, laying it across the centre, then unfolding it over the filling is simply how you move a large thin round of pastry without tearing it. It still works better than lifting it flat.
- Sealing the rimWetting the rim and pressing with a floured thumb is the whole seal here -- there is no crimping or fork-sealing instruction. With a juicy filling, a proper crimp and a baking sheet underneath will save the oven floor.
By the late nineteenth century American home cooks appear to have used "puff paste" loosely for any rich pastry, whether or not it involved the French method of folding butter into dough through repeated turns. True pâte feuilletée demanded a cool room, a marble slab and resting between turns -- luxuries a farm kitchen with a wood range did not have. What survived in books like this is the fat-heavy shortcut: the same one-to-one ratio of fat to flour that gives puff pastry its lift, but rubbed in all at once and trusted to flake on its own. The mixture of butter and lard "half and half" was standard economy and standard technique both at once -- lard was cheaper and produced a more tender crumb, butter supplied the flavour.