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Tip Top Pastry
½ teaspoonful salt 1½ teaspoonfuls baking powder 2¼ cupfuls flour ½ cupful Crisco Cold water 1 teaspoonful lemon juice Sift and mix together flour, salt, and baking powder. Rub in Crisco with finger tips. Chill two hours. Then take out 1/2 cupful, and to remainder add lemon juice and cold water gradually to make stiff paste. Knead lightly and roll into long narrow strip. Sprinkle dough with half of reserved mixture and fold so as to make 3 layers. Turn half way round, roll again into strip, sprinkle with rest of mixture and fold as before. Roll and fold twice more, and pastry is ready for use for cakes, puddings, or pies. Sufficient for two pies.
A rough-puff pastry built on the folding method, written to sell shortening. It works, but two of the quantities need a second look before you start.
- The fat is written high1½ cups of shortening to 2½ cups of flour is 3:5 by volume, richer than the 1:2 or 1:3 more usual for pie pastry. If you want a crust that holds a rim, ¾ cup is a safer reading; at 1½ cups expect something closer to a short, crumbling biscuit paste.
- "Take out ½ cupful"This is half a cup of the chilled flour-and-fat rubbing, not extra shortening. It goes back in dry between the folds, which is what creates the layers — the same idea as the butter block in classic puff, done crudely.
- Water is unmeasuredThe original says only "cold water gradually." For 2½ cups of flour expect 5 to 8 tablespoons, ice cold, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres. Stop early; more water means more gluten and a tough crust.
- Baking powder in pastryA period habit; the usual explanation is that it lightens a crust made with a solid vegetable fat, which does not puff the way butter's water content does, though the recipe does not say so. It is optional and most modern pie doughs leave it out.
- Chill between foldsThe recipe chills once, for two hours, then rolls and folds four times in a row. In a warm kitchen the fat will smear. Rest the dough 20 minutes in the refrigerator after every second turn, and rechill the shaped shell before it goes in the oven.
- The lemon juiceAcid is traditionally said to relax the gluten slightly and make the dough easier to roll thin. A teaspoon in this quantity will not be tasted in the finished crust.
- OvenNo temperature is given; few home ranges of this date had a reliable oven thermometer or thermostat. Blind-bake or bake a filled pie starting hot, 425°F, dropping to 350°F once the pastry is set and coloured.
- Yield"Sufficient for two pies" probably means two single crusts of about 9 inches, or one double-crust pie. The dough freezes well wrapped tight, before the final folds or after.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, who had introduced the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening two years earlier and needed to teach cooks what to do with a fat that behaved like lard but came from a plant. Almost every recipe in the book is a demonstration: here the point is that a vegetable shortening can be rubbed in, chilled and folded to make a laminated pastry, the job that had belonged to butter and leaf lard. The marketing leaned hard on the product being neither animal nor dairy — useful to kosher households and to anyone suspicious of the packing houses in the years after Upton Sinclair — and on its keeping qualities in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration. The plain, slightly boastful recipe titles throughout the book, this one included, are the tone of an advertisement rather than a cookbook, and the flour-in-the-folds shortcut is a home-kitchen simplification of the pâte feuilletée that professional bakers were making with butter blocks.