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Crust for Meat Pie
1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's. 1¾ cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's 4 teaspoons baking powder Cornstarch 1/4 cup Mazola 3/4 cup milk Sift together the dry ingredients, stir in the Mazola and enough milk to make a dough of the right consistency to roll out. Roll to one-half inch thickness, slash in the center and put on the pie. Moisten the edges and put a strip of the dough around the top to seal the pie, or cut it in biscuits, putting them on top of the pie, as close together as possible.
A baking-powder biscuit dough made with oil rather than solid fat, meant to be laid over a hot filling. The ingredient list as printed runs in two columns and has been scrambled in transcription.
- Reading the ingredient listThe items are: 1 3/4 cups flour, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's cornstarch, 1/4 cup Mazola, 3/4 cup milk. "Cornstarch" belongs with "Argo or Kingsford's", not as a separate ingredient.
- MazolaCorn oil, then and now, and still sold under the same name. Any neutral vegetable oil works. Because the fat is liquid, this dough will never flake like a lard or butter pastry; it bakes up tender and cakey, closer to a drop biscuit.
- The cornstarchCornstarch makes up 1/4 cup of the 2 cups of dry starch and flour together, about one-eighth of the total; it lowers the gluten and softens the crumb, the same trick used to imitate cake flour. A house-brand cookbook would have its own reason to favour it. Keep the total at 2 cups of dry starch and flour together.
- Baking powderJust over 2 teaspoons per cup of flour, higher than modern practice of about 1 to 1 1/2. Baking powders of this period were generally single-acting, giving up their gas on contact with liquid rather than in the oven; with a current double-acting powder, about 3 teaspoons total should give plenty of lift without a metallic aftertaste.
- Mix and stopStir only until the dough holds together, and roll once. Oil doughs toughen quickly and there is no layering to protect, so a second rolling gives a leathery crust.
- Half an inch is thickThat thickness needs real heat to cook through before the top colours. Bake at 425F, and put the crust on filling that is already simmering hot so the underside sets rather than turning to paste.
- The steam ventThe centre slash and the sealing strip around the rim are doing opposite jobs: the strip locks the crust to the dish so it does not shrink into the gravy, the slash lets steam out so the middle does not dome and split. Cut both before baking, not after.
- YieldEnough for the top of one 9- or 10-inch deep pie, or about ten 2-inch biscuits laid over a similar dish. Serves six to eight as part of a meat pie.
The branded ingredients suggest this comes from one of the corporate cookery pamphlets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, which owned Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch and, from the early 1910s, the corn oil sold as Mazola. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply to teach cooks new uses for the sponsor's products, which is why a plain meat-pie crust here contains both cornstarch and a quarter cup of oil. The pitch was partly economic and partly dietary: liquid corn oil was promoted as a cleaner, more digestible cooking fat than animal shortening, an argument the industry would keep making for the next century. The biscuit-topped meat pie itself was standard American family cooking, a way of stretching stewed beef or leftover fowl, and the dough is cut in rounds and crowded on top.