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Dessert

Good Plain Pie-crust

A simple pie crust made with flour, lard, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Good Plain Pie-crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl.

  2. Cut in ½ pound of hard lard until well combined.

  3. Moisten the mixture with 1 pint of ice water and mix with a knife.

Roll and chill

  1. Dust a clean surface with flour and turn out the dough.

  2. Roll out the dough and cut in ¼ pound of lard in two rollings.

  3. Handle the dough as little as possible.

  4. Chill the dough in the refrigerator for 1 hour before baking.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough once moistened and worked.
Hard lard
Creates flaky layers by keeping fat pieces separate in the dough, and adds tenderness.
Ice water
Moistens the flour so the dough holds together without developing much gluten.

The step that matters

Handle the dough as little as possible. Overworking flour and water develops gluten, making the crust tough rather than tender. Keeping the dough cold and handling it lightly preserves the solid fat pieces that create flakiness.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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