Top Layer
2 cupfuls flour ½ cupful Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder ½ teaspoonful salt
This is a component, not a finished dish: the upper crust of a two-layer pastry, given as an ingredient list with the method assumed. A few of the printed fractions do not add up, and that is the first thing to settle.
- The fractions are almost certainly garbledThe fractions look garbled -- 1½ cups of shortening to 2 cups of flour is far more fat than a short crust wants (that is only about four parts flour to three parts fat by volume). A smaller figure, somewhere in the ⅓ to ⅔ cup range, is likelier; but the correct reading is a guess, not a demonstrated misprint.
- The salt too1½ teaspoons of salt in 2 cups of flour is high for a pie crust; ½ teaspoon is a more usual figure. If in doubt, err low.
- No liquid is listedThe original omits the water, as period pastry entries often do. Expect 4 to 6 tablespoons of ice water, added a spoonful at a time until the dough just coheres.
- Baking powder in pastryNot necessarily an error; some pastry recipes of this period do include a little, which gives a lighter, slightly biscuit-like lift. It can be left out for a flakier, crisper crust.
- Crisco is not the same productThe 1913 fat was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, with much more trans fat than today's reformulated blend; how the two compare in texture is not documented. Either way, chill the fat hard and chill the mixed dough at least 30 minutes before rolling.
- Method, in one lineCut the cold fat into the sifted dry ingredients until it looks like coarse crumbs, bind with ice water, rest chilled, roll thin. Handle as little as possible.
- YieldTwo cups of flour is generally reckoned enough for a 9-inch top and bottom crust, so ample for the top layer alone.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens. Crisco, introduced in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil: a solid vegetable shortening that behaved something like lard, kept without refrigeration, and was marketed heavily to households that avoided pork fat, including Jewish cooks for whom it was pareve. Pastry arguably makes the book's best case for the new fat, and entries like this one — for a top and bottom layer, with the technique taken for granted — show how much a 1913 reader was assumed to already know about rubbing fat into flour.