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Plain Paste
One and one-half cups of flour; one-fourth cup of butter; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth cup of ice water; onefourth cup of lard. These ingredients will make sufficient paste for a pie with upper and under crusts. Sift the flour, measure it and add the salt. Chop the lard and butter into the flour with a sharp knife, but do not chop too fine. Add the water gradually, mixing the mass with the knife and adding only enough to hold the dough together. Turn out on a board and roll lightly, folding in the same way as for puff paste, but rolling and folding only until the paste can be shaped. Plain paste is not so easily rolled as puff paste, but it should be rolled as lightly as possible. Roll as thin as possible when using. When the sheet is laid in the pie tin, lift it lightly to allow all the air to escape from underneath; otherwise the crust may hump up when baking, especially if it is a custard pie. The crust will shrink in the baking, so when the edges are trimmed a sharp knife should be used and the crust turned away from the tin to allow for the shrinking.
A straightforward short-crust: half butter, half lard, worked cold and folded a few times for flakiness. The instructions are sound; only the measuring conventions and the missing oven temperature need translating.
- Sift, then measureThe book means it literally — flour was sifted and then spooned into the cup, which gives roughly 4 oz (115 g) per cup rather than the 5 oz you get by scooping. If you skip sifting, weigh instead: about 6 oz (170 g) flour to 4 oz (115 g) total fat.
- The fatOne-fourth cup each of butter and lard is about 2 oz (55 g) each, 4 oz total. Modern leaf lard or a good rendered lard behaves as intended; hydrogenated shortening gives a different and blander result. All-butter works but the crust will be less tender.
- Water is a guide, not a quantityA quarter cup is a starting point. Flour's absorption varies with humidity and milling, so follow the actual instruction — add only enough to hold the mass together. Overshooting is a common cause of a tough, shrunken crust.
- Keep everything cold"Chop the lard and butter into the flour... but do not chop too fine" means visible pea-sized pieces of fat, which is where the flakiness comes from. Use ice water, and if the kitchen is warm chill the bowl and the cut fat first.
- Rest before rollingThe book goes straight from mixing to the board. Thirty minutes wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and makes the dough both easier to roll and less prone to the shrinking the recipe warns about.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; cooks on coal ranges commonly judged heat by hand or by scorching a sheet of paper. For pastry, start hot: 425°F (220°C) for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350–375°F (175–190°C) to finish. Custard pies are usually finished at a lower heat, around 325–350°F.
- The humping crustLifting the sheet to release trapped air, as directed, is genuinely effective, and for a single-crust custard or pumpkin pie it is worth blind baking with weights as well — a wet filling on raw pastry gives a soggy base.
- YieldEnough for one double-crust pie; 1½ cups of flour suits an 8- to 9-inch tin. The book specifies neither a tin size nor a number of servings.
The distinction the Butterick book draws between "plain paste" and "puff paste" was standard in English and American cookery from the eighteenth century onward: puff paste took a large block of butter folded through many turns for the leaves, while plain paste — short crust, pie crust, paste for family pies — used less fat, cut in, with only two or three folds. The half-butter, half-lard mixture was a common household compromise in this period, lard being cheap, plentiful from the home-butchered pig or the packing houses, and widely preferred for tenderness, while butter supplied the flavour lard lacked. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published its cook book in 1911 as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its sewing patterns, and the tone on this page is practical rather than theoretical: just the two or three points — cold fat, minimum water, allow for shrinkage — that decide whether the crust succeeds.