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Rough Puff Pastry
2 cupfuls flour. ½ cupful Crisco, generous measure ½ teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful lemon juice 1 egg Cold water Have Crisco cold and firm. Sift flour and salt into basin, add Crisco and cut into pieces one inch square. Beat up egg, add lemon juice and a very little cold water, then add them gradually into other ingredients making them into a stiff paste. Roll in a long piece on floured board, fold in three, turn rough edges toward you and roll out again, continuing this for five times. Place in refrigerator or in cool place ten minutes between each rolling. This pastry may be used at once for all kinds of sweet or savory pies, but it is improved by standing for a few hours in a cool place. Bake in hot oven. Sufficient for two covered pies.
A standard rough puff worked out for a solid vegetable shortening rather than butter. One key quantity is missing from the printed text, so read the notes before you start.
- The flour is missingThe ingredient list gives fat, salt, lemon juice and egg but no flour, plainly a typesetting omission. For 1½ cups of shortening a workable rough puff takes about 3 cups (roughly 13 oz) of plain flour; that is an inference from the ratio, not from the book.
- "Hot oven"In this period that means 425-450F. Puff pastry needs the high heat to flash the water in the dough into steam before the fat melts out; a moderate oven gives a greasy, flat crust.
- Crisco cold and firmModern Crisco has been reformulated and is no longer the straight hydrogenated cottonseed oil of 1913; it is now a soybean and palm oil blend, and may behave a little softer at room temperature. Chill it hard, and cut it into the flour still cold so the inch-square pieces stay intact through the first roll.
- The hinge: visible lumps of fatThis is not a rubbed-in pastry. The squares of shortening should still be visible as streaks in the dough after mixing and after the first turn or two. Rolling them into flat sheets between layers of dough is what makes the pastry rise.
- Lemon juice and eggThe acid is generally held to slacken the gluten so the dough rolls without springing back; the egg adds richness and colour. Rough puff can be made without either, but they are part of this version's character. Use the water sparingly - the recipe wants a stiff paste, not a soft one.
- Five turns, ten minutes eachTen minutes in a modern refrigerator is on the short side for the later turns. If the fat starts to smear or push through the dough, give it twenty to thirty minutes and start again.
- BasinSimply a mixing bowl. A wide, shallow one is easier for cutting fat into flour with two knives or a pastry blender.
- Yield"Two covered pies" means tops and bottoms for two pies; the book gives no diameter, so assume something in the region of 9 inches. The dough freezes well after the final turn, wrapped tightly.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco itself came on the market, and was written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's purpose was to persuade cooks that a shelf-stable hydrogenated vegetable fat could stand in for butter, lard and suet in every department of the kitchen, and the pastry chapter carried much of that argument: pastry is often said to have been the test case where cooks were most attached to lard and most sceptical of substitutes. Rough puff itself is much older than the book - a shortcut version of classic puff pastry in which the fat is cut in as lumps rather than enclosed in a single sheet and folded, giving a coarser, less even lift for a fraction of the labour. It appears in British and American manuals through the nineteenth century under a variety of names, and Neil's version is conventional in everything but the fat.