Puff Pastry
1 yolk of egg 2 teaspoonfuls lemon juice Cold water Measure Crisco and set in cold place to chill it. Sift flour and salt into basin, and add lemon juice. Take a quarter of the Crisco, and rub it lightly into flour with finger tips until there are no lumps left. Beat yolk of egg and add a little cold water, then add them to the flour, making them into a stiffish dough. Turn this on to floured board, and work well with hands until it will no longer stick to fingers and forms a perfectly smooth dough. Form into oblong piece and roll out to about half inch thickness. The Crisco to be used should be as nearly as possible of same consistency as the paste.
Form it into neat flat cake, and place in center of pastry. Fold up rather loosely, and flat the folds with rolling-pin. Place in refrigerator for ten minutes. Then roll out pastry into long narrow strip, being careful Pastries that Crisco does not get through. Fold exactly in three, press down folds, and lay aside in cool place or in refrigerator fifteen minutes. This is called giving the pastry one "turn" and seven of these is the number required for this pastry. The next time the pastry is rolled, place it with the joins at your right hand side, and open ends towards you. Give two "turns" this time, and again set aside in cool place for at least fifteen minutes. Repeat this until pastry has had seven rolls in all. The object of the cooling between the rolls is to keep Crisco and flour in distinct and se separate layers, in which it is the function of the rolling-pin and folding to arrange them, and on which the lightness of the pastry depends. When rolling, keep the pressure of the two hands as equal as possible. If the pastry becomes rounded, it shows that there is more pressure being done on the rounded side than the other. After it has received its last roll, it is better to be laid aside before using, then rolled to the thickness required. Sufficient for two pies. 2 cupfuls flour
A classic seven-turn puff paste with vegetable shortening standing in for butter. The ingredient list has been scrambled in the original setting — the flour appears at the very end and the shortening quantity is missing altogether — so read the whole method before starting.
- The missing quantityNo weight of Crisco is given anywhere in the text, and no salt measure either. Puff paste is commonly made with fat at or near the weight of the flour; something in the region of a cup of shortening to the 2 cupfuls of flour, with a teaspoon of salt, would be in keeping. The original is genuinely incomplete on this point.
- Temperature is the whole recipeThe instruction that matters is that the fat and the dough must be of the same firmness when they are laminated. Shortening softer than the paste squeezes out at the edges; harder, and it tears through the layers and the pastry bakes flat.
- Crisco behaves differently from butterIt has no water and a wider plastic range than butter, so it stays workable at warmer room temperatures and is more forgiving of a cook who works slowly. It also carries no flavour of its own.
- The lemon juiceAcid slackens the gluten slightly so the dough stretches under the pin instead of springing back. Two teaspoons in two cups of flour is a small amount and will not be tasted.
- Counting the turnsThe text is confusing: it describes one turn, then two turns at a time, to a total of seven rolls. In practice, roll and fold in three, rest 15 minutes chilled, and repeat until you have done seven folds in all, resting after every one or two.
- Resting periodsTen to fifteen minutes in a modern refrigerator, which runs colder than a 1913 icebox, is usually enough; longer is safer in a warm kitchen. If the paste resists the pin or the fat starts to show as grey patches, stop and chill it.
- BakingNo oven instruction is given. Puff paste needs a hot oven — 425–450°F — so the trapped water flashes to steam and lifts the layers before the fat melts out. A moderate oven produces a greasy, dense pastry.
- YieldSufficient for two pies, meaning two single crusts or the tops and bottoms of one covered pie. The finished paste keeps two days chilled and freezes well.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a product no one had asked for: a solid, shelf-stable fat made by hydrogenating cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911. Cottonseed had been an oil-mill by-product with a poor reputation, and hardening it into something that looked and handled like lard was both a technical achievement and a marketing problem. Recipes like this one — a full seven-turn puff paste, the most demanding thing in a pastry cook's repertoire — were the answer: if the new fat could laminate, it could do anything butter or lard could. The book leaned hard on that argument, along with claims about digestibility and about Crisco's suitability for kosher and vegetarian kitchens, since it contained no animal product. The method itself is straight out of the English and French pastry tradition and would be recognisable to any cook a century earlier; only the fat is new.