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German Paste
5 cupfuls flour 1½ cupfuls Crisco 1/3 cupful ground almonds 1 cupful sugar ½ eggs 2 yolks of eggs 1½ teaspoonfuls salt Water Sift flour and almonds into basin, rub Crisco into them, add salt, sugar, eggs well beaten and water to make stiff paste. Leave in cool place two hours, then roll out and use for pies and tartlets. Sufficient for four pies.
A sweet, short almond pastry of the Mürbeteig family, written for a cook who was expected to judge the water by feel. Most of what needs translating here is measurement and handling.
- The hinge: keep it cold, and do not overwork itWith 1½ cups of fat and two whole eggs plus two yolks, this is a rich, fragile dough that turns greasy and tough if kneaded. Rub the fat in until the mixture looks like coarse meal, bring it together with the minimum of water, and stop. The two hours in a cool place is not optional resting time; it firms the fat so the dough can be rolled at all.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening; the product sold today has been reformulated, and is generally reckoned softer than the early version, though the comparison is hard to pin down. Modern all-vegetable shortening works; chilled butter gives better flavour and a shorter crumb, and lard behaves similarly in a rubbed-in paste. Whatever you use, it should be cold and firm, not soft.
- "Basin"British-inflected phrasing for a mixing bowl. Nothing special is meant by it.
- Water is unmeasured, deliberatelyWater is unmeasured -- The original gives no quantity, only "water to make stiff paste." Expect a few tablespoons at most, since the eggs and yolks already supply liquid. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the dough just coheres.
- Ground almondsAlmond flour or almond meal. Sifting ground almonds with flour is largely futile; whisk them in instead. Blanched almond flour rather than skin-on meal will give a paler crust, if that is what you want.
- No oven temperature is givenThe dough is a shell, baked to suit the filling. For a blind-baked tartlet case, 375–400°F until the edges are pale gold; the sugar and almond will colour faster than a plain pie crust, so watch it from about twelve minutes.
- Yield"Sufficient for four pies" means four single crusts or a large batch of tartlets; the listed ingredients come to roughly 2½–3 lb of dough, so the four crusts are generous ones. Halve it comfortably, or freeze the surplus wrapped tight.
- Rolling and patchingSweet dough this rich tears rather than stretches. Roll between sheets of parchment, and press scraps into any splits in the tin instead of re-rolling, which toughens it.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to teach American cooks what to do with a product that had only existed since 1911 — a hydrogenated cottonseed oil sold as a replacement for both butter and lard. The book leans heavily on established European pastry repertoire to prove the new fat could do respectable work, and "German paste" is one of those borrowings: a sweetened, egg-enriched, almond-scented short dough of the kind German and Austrian bakers call Mürbeteig, used for Torten shells and small tarts. English cookery writing of the period used "paste" where we now say pastry, and pastes were often distinguished by nationality as a rough shorthand for how rich and how sweet. The recipe's use of "basin" reflects Neil's British training and the transatlantic circulation of pastry recipes rather than anything specific to Crisco itself.