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Chopped Paste
Put one quart of pastry-flour, two breakfast cupfuls of butter, one tablespoonful of sugar and one teaspoonful of salt on a chopping-board and chop them all together until well mixed; add three-fourths of a breakfast cupful of iced-water and continue chopping. When thoroughly mixed, lift the paste, sprinkle the board with flour, then roll the paste out thin on it. The paste is better to stand on ice for a while, as it should be hard before being used.
This is a component recipe — a rich, flaky short paste for pies and tarts, mixed entirely with a knife on a board. The proportions are equal weights of flour and butter, which puts it closer to a French pâte brisée than to a modern American pie dough.
- Keep everything coldThe chopping method exists for one reason: to cut fat into flour without warming it, so the butter stays in flakes rather than blending into the flour. If the butter starts to look greasy or smeared, stop and chill the board and the mixture before going on.
- A quart of flourMeasured by volume, a quart of pastry flour is about 4 cups, roughly 16 oz / 450 g. Weigh it if you can — sifted pastry flour packs very differently from scooped.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup in this period runs 8 to 10 fl oz; the standard 8 oz cup is the safe reading. Two of them of butter is about 1 lb, and three-fourths of one of iced water is about 6 fl oz.
- Pastry-flour is not a synonymPastry flour is about 8-9% protein. All-purpose will work but produces a tougher, less tender crust; replacing about two tablespoons of flour per cup with cornstarch approximates it if pastry flour is unavailable.
- Water is a range, not a figureSix fluid ounces is a starting point. Flour absorbency and butter water content vary, so add the last of it a spoonful at a time and stop when the mass just coheres under the blade.
- Butter and saltUnsalted butter lets you control the seasoning, since the recipe adds its own teaspoon of salt; if you use salted butter, cut back. The tablespoon of sugar is for browning and flavor, not sweetness, so this paste suits savory pies as readily as fruit ones.
- "Stand on ice"An hour in the refrigerator, wrapped, is the modern equivalent; overnight is better. Oscar is right that it should be firm before rolling, but let it sit at room temperature five to ten minutes if it has gone rock hard, or it will crack instead of rolling.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 lb of dough — enough for two double-crust 9-inch pies, or three to four single crusts. It freezes well for up to three months.
- BakingNo oven instruction is given because this is a base recipe. For a blind-baked shell, 400F with weights until set and pale gold, then lower to 350F to dry out the bottom.
Oscar Tschirky was not a chef but the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially the hotel's working repertoire written down at scale — hence the quart of flour and the pound of butter, quantities that make sense on a hotel bench. "Paste" for pastry dough is the older English usage, still standard in the nineteenth century and surviving in "puff paste" and in the French pâte it translates; "dough" was for bread. Chopping fat into flour with a knife or a pair of knives on a board was one established method before the wire pastry blender became common in American kitchens, and it has the advantage of keeping warm hands off the butter. Recipes of this richness, equal parts flour and butter, sit on the border between short paste and rough puff, and the instruction to chill the dough hard before rolling is the whole reason such a fat-heavy paste can be handled at all.