Home › Pastry › Flaky Pie Crust
Flaky Pie Crust
Three cupfuls of flour, half a cupful of butter, half a cupful of lard, three-fourths of a cupful of ice water. Sift the flour into a chopping bowl, add the butter and lard and chop with a chopping knife until no pieces of the shortening larger than a pea can be seen. Then sprinkle the ice water here and there through the flour and mix with a fork into rather soft dough or paste. Pile upon a wellfloured kneading board, dust lightly with flour, press down with the rolling pin, and roll gently back and forth until the paste becomes an oblong sheet not more than half an inch in thickness. Slip a broad-bladed knife under each end of this sheet, and fold over toward the center, thus forming three layers of the paste. Lift with the knife from the board-which dust with fresh flour-lay it at right angles with the position it occupied when lifted, dust with flour, roll out and again fold over as before. Repeat the operation and the paste is ready to lay aside for future use, or to roll into form and use at once. When the ice water is added to the flour and shortening, the shortening becomes distributed through the flour in small balls, and if the mixing is done lightly, it remains as balls and is not packed together in a mass, and when the dough is drawn together and lightly pressed with the rolling pin, these balls flatten into flakes, which, by repeated foldings, are piled one upon another, and by gentle rolling thinner and more delicate. Three rollings and foldings are as much as these flakes will bear. Rolling and folding a greater number of times causes them to become broken and packed, so that the paste will not rise and puff up, as it should, in baking.
This is a rough-puff method disguised as an ordinary pie crust, and the reasoning printed at the end of the recipe is sound. The instructions are complete except for salt, resting time and an oven temperature.
- The hinge: three folds, no moreThe author is explicit and correct — three rollings and foldings is the limit. Further rolling shears the flattened fat sheets and works the gluten, and the crust bakes dense instead of puffing.
- Salt is missingThe ingredient list gives none. Many pastry recipes of the period do include a little, though plain pastes without it are also common. About a teaspoon sifted with the flour suits 3 cups if you want it.
- Chopping bowl and knifeA wooden bowl with a curved single- or double-bladed chopper. A pastry blender does the same work; two knives or your fingertips also serve. A food processor cuts the fat too finely and too warmly for this particular method, which depends on visible pea-sized pieces surviving into the rolling.
- LardHalf butter, half lard was a common American proportion. Leaf lard from a butcher behaves as intended; supermarket shortening will work but gives less flavor. Keep both fats cold and firm, straight from the refrigerator.
- CupfulsTurn-of-the-century cups run close to the modern 8 oz measure, so 3 cups flour, 1/2 cup (4 oz) butter, 1/2 cup lard, 3/4 cup ice water. Flour differed from modern all-purpose, so hold back a couple of tablespoons of the water and add only what the dough needs.
- Rest before rolling outThe recipe permits laying the folded paste aside, and it is worth doing. Wrapped and chilled 30 minutes, the dough relaxes and rolls without springing back or tearing.
- OvenNone is given. Pastry of this kind wants a hot oven, 425F, so the water in the fat layers flashes to steam before the fat simply melts out; drop to 350F to finish a filled pie.
- YieldThree cups of flour makes roughly one 9-inch double crust, or two single shells.
The explanation appended to this recipe marks it as a product of the late nineteenth-century domestic-science movement, when cookbook writers increasingly told readers why a method worked rather than simply issuing orders — the fat as small balls, flattened into flakes, stacked by folding. The technique itself is a household simplification of French pâte feuilletée, in which a block of butter is folded into dough through six or more turns; the shortcut version, cut fat instead of a laminated block and only three folds, is what English and American cooks came to call flaky or rough paste. Half butter, half lard was a common combination of the era: lard was cheap and gave tenderness, while butter supplied flavor. The insistence on ice water and a chopping bowl reflects a kitchen with limited cooling, where keeping the fat solid through mixing was the whole battle.