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Plain Crisco Pastry
1 1/2 cupfuls flour. 1/2 cupful Crisco. ½ teaspoonful salt Cold water Sift flour and salt and cut Crisco into flour with knife until finely divided. Finger tips may be used to finish blending materials. Add gradually sufficient water to make stiff paste. Water should be added sparingly and mixed with knife through dry ingredients. Form lightly and quickly with hand into dough; roll out on slightly floured board, about one-quarter inch thick. Use light motion in handling rolling-pin, and roll from center outward. Sufficient for one small pie.
A straightforward short-crust built on solid vegetable shortening rather than lard or butter, printed at a time when Crisco was new enough to need explaining. The ingredient list was set at the foot of the page and has come through jumbled, so read it before you start.
- The quantitiesTwo cups flour, 3/4 cup Crisco, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, one egg, cold water. That is roughly 250 g flour to 145 g shortening, a rich ratio that will give a tender, crumbly crust rather than a flaky layered one.
- The unexplained eggThe egg appears in the ingredient list and nowhere in the method. The likeliest reading is that it was meant to be beaten with a little cold water and counted as part of the liquid; treat it that way and reduce the added water accordingly, or leave it out with no great loss.
- Keep everything coldThe hinge of the recipe is the instruction to add water sparingly and cut it in with a knife. Shortening softened by warm hands or overworked dough gives a tough, greasy crust. Chill the Crisco, use ice water, and stop mixing the moment the dough coheres.
- Rest before rollingThe original goes straight from mixing to rolling. Half an hour wrapped in the refrigerator relaxes the gluten and makes the quarter-inch roll-out far easier, particularly with a dough this stiff.
- Crisco is not what it wasThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, firmer and more waxy than the current palm- and soybean-based formulation, reformulated in the 2000s to cut trans fats to under half a gram per serving. Today's shortening is softer at room temperature; keep it well chilled to compensate.
- Yield"Sufficient for one small pie" is vague by modern standards; two cups of flour is probably enough for a small covered pie or a couple of single shells, and will be stretched thin by a deep-dish 9-inch double crust.
- BakingNo oven is given. A filled fruit pie wants a hot oven, 425F, dropped to 350F once the crust has set; an empty shell blind-bakes at 400-425F until the edges color, about 15-20 minutes with weights.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is advertising as much as cookery: a book of some six hundred recipes written to persuade American cooks that a hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for lard and butter in everything they already made. Pastry was the crucial argument. Lard had long been the standard shortening for pie crust in the United States, and a company selling a new solid fat had to prove it could produce a tender crust before it could sell anything else. Hence a recipe as plain as this one, with no flourishes: two cups of flour, cold water, a light hand, and the point made. The book also leaned on the fact that a vegetable shortening was neither meat nor dairy, a selling point that P&G's marketing pursued deliberately in kosher kitchens.