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Hot Water Paste
1 cupful flour ½ teaspoonful salt 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/4 teaspoonful baking powder 3 tablespoonfuls boiling water Sift flour, salt and baking powder into basin, rub Crisco lightly into them, then stir in boiling water. Cool paste before using, or it will be too , then stir in boiling water. Cool paste before using, or it will be too sticky to handle.
Sufficient for one pie.
Pastries
A single-crust hot water pastry, leaner in fat than most short crusts and mixed with boiling water rather than ice water. The two techniques are opposites, so read the method before you start.
- The hinge: cool it before rollingBoiling water melts the shortening and softens the flour, so the warm dough is slack and tacky. Wrap and chill it at least 30 minutes, until the fat is firm again, or it will stick to everything and tear.
- Printing error in the originalThe line "or it will be too , then stir in boiling water" is a compositor's duplication in the source text. The intended sentence is simply that the paste must be cooled or it will be too sticky to handle.
- Crisco and substitutionsCrisco in 1913 was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening; today's version is reformulated to cut trans fat, but it behaves much the same here. Any vegetable shortening or lard works; butter contains water and will make a softer, less short crust.
- Fat proportionFour tablespoons to one cup of flour is roughly 2 oz fat to 4½ oz flour: a little leaner than a typical American pie crust, though close to the usual half-fat-to-flour shortcrust ratio. Expect a firm crust rather than a markedly flaky one, which is the character of hot water paste rather than a fault.
- "Basin" and "rub in"A basin is any mixing bowl. Rubbing the fat in lightly means working it to coarse crumbs with the fingertips, not creaming it smooth.
- The baking powderA quarter teaspoon, presumably to give a little lift to a crust made with boiling water. There is no reason to increase it.
- Yield and baking'Sufficient for one pie' means one 8- or 9-inch bottom crust or lid, not a double crust. The original gives no oven directions; as a modern starting point, blind-bake hot (around 425F) for 12–15 minutes with weights if the filling is wet, or start a filled pie hot and drop to about 350F until set.
Hot water paste is the old British pie-maker's dough, the one used for raised pork pies and game pies, where a hot dough could be moulded by hand into standing walls and would set firm enough to hold a heavy filling. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco — a 1913 promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to introduce a brand-new vegetable shortening — shows the book's strategy plainly: take a pastry method a housekeeper already knew and demonstrate that the new tin could stand in for lard, butter or drippings. Marion Harris Neil, who compiled the recipes, was an experienced cookery writer, and the collection reads as a systematic argument rather than a scattering of novelties.