Home › Pastries › The New Crisco Pastry
The New Crisco Pastry
2 cupfuls flour 3/4 cupful Crisco 1 egg. 3/4 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful lemon juice Sufficient cold water to hold mixture together Sift flour and salt into basin. Flour blade of knife, and chop Crisco into flour, being careful to keep flour between blade of knife and shortening. When mixture looks like meal, add gradually, egg well beaten and mixed with lemon juice. Roll pastry into ball with knife. May be used at once, but will be improved if allowed to stand in cool place for one hour. Should be rolled out once and handled as lightly as possible. May be used for sweet or savory dishes. Bake in hot oven. The purpose of the addition of lemon is to render gluten of flour more ductile, so that it will stretch rather than break as paste is rolled out, or as it rises in oven. Sufficient for two pies.
A short-crust made with vegetable shortening rather than lard or butter, from the promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble published to teach cooks what to do with its new product. The ingredient list as printed here is incomplete, so treat the method as the useful part.
- The missing quantitiesThe excerpt begins mid-list: the flour, the Crisco and the egg all appear in the method but their amounts are gone. A standard two-crust pastry of this type runs about 2 cups flour to 2/3 cup shortening with 1 egg, but that is a reconstruction, not what the book said.
- Hot oven"Hot" in early twentieth-century American usage is usually glossed at somewhere around 400-450F. Shortening pastry wants the upper end of that so the fat sets the layers before it can render out and soak the base.
- Crisco itselfIn 1911 Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Today's product is a soybean and palm blend, reformulated to remove trans fats. Chill it before cutting it in.
- Cutting in with a knifeThe instruction to keep flour between the blade and the fat is a real technique, not fussiness: it stops the shortening smearing. A pastry blender or two knives does the same job faster, and food-processor pulses work if you stop while the mixture still looks like coarse meal.
- The lemon juiceThe book's explanation is half right. Acid does slacken gluten slightly, which makes the dough less springy and less inclined to shrink in the tin. It does not make the paste "rise" in any meaningful sense.
- Rest and roll onceThe hour in a cool place is worth taking; it lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax. Rolling once and lightly is the hinge of the whole recipe — rerolling scraps builds the elasticity the lemon was added to undo.
- Yield"Sufficient for two pies" is all the book says; no tin size is given. On a modern standard tin that would be read as two single crusts, or one double-crust pie.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the company began selling hydrogenated cottonseed oil as a kitchen fat in 1911, and it belongs to a genre of cookbooks written to create a market rather than record one. Cooks in 1913 knew lard, butter and suet; they had no reason to trust a white, odorless, shelf-stable solid that came out of a factory, so the book argues its case with recipes, and with pointed asides about cleanliness, digestibility and the fact that the product was neither animal nor rancid. Pastry was the natural place to make the argument, since shortening's high melting point and lack of water genuinely do produce a tender crust with little effort. The small chemistry lesson attached to the lemon juice is characteristic of the period's household-science tone, when writers like Fannie Farmer and the domestic economy movement were teaching cooks to think of the kitchen as a laboratory — and it suited a manufacturer to have its fat discussed in the same breath as gluten and ductility.