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Lard Paste
Cut some lard into thin slices and roll these in a little flour; continue thus until all the lard and flour are used, then mix in enough cold water to make a soft paste. Lay the paste on a floured cloth and keep it in a cold place for half an hour. After that put it on a floured paste-board and roll it out with a floured rolling-pin to the thickness of one inch. Place the paste again in a floured cloth in a cold place and leave it half an hour longer. Roll the paste out very thin, doubling it over six times. The paste should be touched as little as possible with the hands.
This is a rough laminated pastry — cold fat coated in flour, bound with water, then rested and folded so the lard stays in sheets rather than blending into the dough. The original gives no quantities at all, which is the first thing to settle.
- No quantities givenThe recipe assumes a cook who knows the ratio. For a rich savoury paste, work from about 2 parts flour to 1 part lard by weight (say 1 lb flour to 8 oz lard), with roughly 6-7 fl oz of ice water. Add the water in stages; flours vary and the original's "enough" is doing real work.
- The hinge: keep the lard in slicesEverything here depends on the fat staying solid and separate. Slicing it, flouring each slice, and folding rather than kneading is what produces the layers. If the lard softens and smears into the flour you get a short crust, not a flaky one.
- "A cold place"The Waldorf larder or icebox; today the refrigerator at about 40F. Two rests of thirty minutes each are the minimum — longer does no harm, and in a warm kitchen the dough will need it.
- "Touched as little as possible"Hands are warm enough to soften lard on contact. Use a bench scraper to fold and lift, flour the pin and board generously, and work quickly.
- One inch thickThat is not a typo for the first roll — a thick slab is easier to fold without tearing the layers. Only the final roll goes "very thin," around an eighth of an inch.
- "Doubling it over six times"Read this as six successive folds with a roll between each, in the manner of puff pastry, not six folds of a single sheet. Return the dough to the cold if it starts to feel greasy or resist the pin.
- Lard todaySupermarket lard is often hydrogenated and stabilised for shelf life; it behaves differently from firm, freshly rendered lard. Leaf lard from a butcher, well chilled, gives the cleanest layers and the mildest flavour.
- Yield and useA 1 lb flour batch lines and covers a large deep pie or makes a dozen turnovers. The paste carries no sugar, so it suits meat pies, game pies and patty cases; the recipe itself specifies no particular use.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 while he was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf, is a large compendium of hotel-kitchen practice rather than a teaching manual for beginners, which is why entries like this one give a method and leave the proportions to the cook. Lard was a standard pastry fat for savoury work in nineteenth-century American kitchens: cheap and plentiful from the pork trade. Hydrogenated vegetable shortening did not reach American shelves until the 1910s, and pastry recipes of Oscar's generation generally assume rendered pork fat unless they say otherwise. The technique itself -- flouring cold fat, resting, folding repeatedly -- is the same rough-puff logic found in English and French pastry manuals of the period.