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Cornstarch Pastry
1¼ cupfuls cornstarch 1¼ cupfuls flour 2 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ cupful Crisco 1 teaspoonful baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt 1 yolk of egg Milk to mix Rub Crisco lightly into cornstarch and flour, add salt, sugar, baking powder, beaten yolk of egg, and sufficient milk to mix to stiff paste. Roll out lightly and use for tartlets or one crust pie.
Sufficient for two large pies.
Pastries 1 cupful sugar 1 cupful sweet milk 2 eggs
A short-flake pastry in which cornstarch replaces roughly half the flour, from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble issued to introduce Crisco. The transcription has suffered in the original printing, so read the quantities with care before you commit.
- The quantitiesThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for 1¼ cupfuls each of cornstarch and flour, ½ cupful Crisco, and ½ teaspoonful salt, as given here. Add the milk by feel until the paste is stiff.
- Stray lines at the endThe final "1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful sweet milk, 2 eggs" belongs to the next recipe in the Pastries section and has nothing to do with this pastry. Ignore it.
- CriscoStill sold, though now reformulated without partially hydrogenated oil, so it will not necessarily behave exactly as the 1913 product did. Chill it firm before rubbing it in. Lard or a modern vegetable shortening substitutes directly by weight.
- What the cornstarch doesCornstarch has no gluten, so it dilutes the flour's protein and gives a notably tender, crumbly, almost sandy crust. The trade-off is strength: this dough tears rather than stretches, and it will not support a deep wet filling. The book's advice to use it for tartlets or a single crust is the point, not a suggestion.
- Sweet milkPeriod usage for ordinary fresh whole milk, as opposed to soured or buttermilk. Use it cold, and add it a tablespoon at a time — cornstarch doughs go from dry to sticky quickly.
- Handle it once"Roll out lightly" is the hinge. With so little gluten, rerolling scraps and working the dough warm are the two things that turn this crust from short to tough and grey. Roll thin, lift with the pin, and chill the lined tin before baking.
- BakingNo temperature is given. Blind-bake a shell at 400–425F until the edges colour, about 15–20 minutes; the crust browns faster than an all-flour pastry because of the sugar and egg yolk. Watch the last few minutes.
- YieldAs reconstructed, enough for the two large single crusts the book claims, or a batch of small tartlet shells.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written to solve a marketing problem: Procter & Gamble had a wholly new fat yed oil is not the point u2014 hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a shelf-stable white solid u2014 and no cook knew what to do with it.