Typewritten Pie Crust: or, Every pie is a journey

My perfect pies are always a bit small.

Flaky Pie Crust 1 cup flour ¼ teaspoon salt 6 tablespoons butter or shortening (or a mix of both) about 3 to 4 tablespoons ice-cold water Have the butter soft enough work with, but still cold enough to be firm. Sift flour and salt into a large bowl. Cut in the butter with a metal spatula until it is roughly in pea-size pieces. Gradually add enough water to make a stiff dough, cutting and turning the dough as before to mix it together. Put in a sealed container (a ziploc bag will do) and let it rest in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. (In colder weather, you can rest it on the countertop unless your kitchen is very warm.) Roll out on a well-floured surface until it is big enough to cover a 9-inch pie pan. Dust flour on top of the dough so it doesn't stick to the rolling pin. If it doesn't come out right the first time, fold the dough up (instead of pressing or wadding it into a ball) and reroll it. Folding the dough helps keep it from becoming tough or sticky when you roll it again. To transfer the crust to the pie pan, fold it loosely into quarters. (You want your folds to make a + sign in the dough-- so don't fold it lengthwise twice like you're folding up a letter.) Place it in the pan, with the corner in the center of the pan. Then unfold it and let it lay into place. Or, roll the dough around the rolling pin. Then hold the rolling pin over the edge of the pie pan and unroll the crust over it. If your recipe calls for a pre-baked pie crust, prick it a few times with a fork. Then bake at 400° for about 15 minutes, or until it's golden. Check on it about halfway through the baking time to see if it's rising up in the pan. If it does, pierce the bubbles with a fork and then press them back down. Source: Typewritten clipping, unknown date Notebook of Hannah D. O'Neil (née Hanora Frances Dannehy)

I couldn't help wondering why my great-grandmother pasted this typewritten pie crust recipe next to two newspaper articles about the same thing. How many pie crusts can one person need?

In case you want to cook like it's 1940s Chicago, her entire recipe binder is here!

Maybe my great-grandmother never got a pie to turn out right and kept adding articles to the collage in the hopes that the next one would finally solve her problems. Or, she might have used bits and parts of the directions from each.

As much as the "perfect pie" clipping in her notebook has changed my baking (almost as much as Delia Smith's tutorial video), my "perfect" crusts are always a bit small. I have to slightly stretch the dough to make it cover the whole pan. It's nice to avoid waste, but I don't want holes under my pies either.

So, I decided to try out the typewritten recipe on the same page. After all, she must have saved it for a reason. Maybe she was like "This. This is the one that always comes out right." 

The directions read like a condensed version of the big newspaper article on the same page. (You know, the one that I learned so much from.) You might follow the newspaper clipping if you've never done this before, but then you would use the short instructions on the typewritten version when you only needed a quick reminder. However, the ingredient amounts are slightly different. I couldn't help wondering if it comes out ever-so-slightly better (and will make pie with the flimsiest of excuses). 

Since this recipe gives us a time and temperature for baking it empty (none of the others do), I picked out a pie that calls for a baked shell just to try it out. (Also I was in the mood for pie.) Also, the other recipes on the page are long newspaper articles with detailed paragraphs. This is just a typewritten slip. Sometimes the most unassuming-looking recipes are the best ones. 

Just in case it matters, I got out the sifter. When we follow directions, we are free to blame the original writer.

The ingredients call for shortening, but I used butter instead. As we have noted previously, shortening makes for crumbly pie dough that is irksome to work with. I told myself that I was probably still following the directions anyway. A lot of older recipes use the word shortening to mean "any solid fat." You often see things like "butter or other shortening" or "dripping, lard, or other shortening" in the ingredient list (if there is one). Or one might find notes like "any other shortening may be substituted for the oleo" in the directions.

I hate that no one (besides Delia Smith, of course) ever says to let the dough rest before getting out a rolling pin. None of the pasted-down pie clippings on my great-grandmother's oversize page doesn't mention it. Maybe it's one of those steps that was too obvious to write at the time, just like no recipe today ever says "discard the eggshells." Frustration aside, it makes me wonder what else no one wrote down that makes their recipes so hard to follow today.

After letting the pie crust rest (seriously, always let the dough sit for at least 30 minutes. It's one of those wonderful times when you can make things better by sitting down), it rolled out into a nearly round shape. I took it as a sign that I had done something right.

It was now time to get this into the pan. Our recipe says to "pat and roll out to fit 9-inch pie pan." As it happens, today's pie pan has "9 INCH" molded into its underside so we know we're following the directions. (As with all our pie pans, I don't know where this one came from.)  

Incidentally, after many pies where I wrapped the crust around the rolling pin and then unrolled it over the pan, I've found it so much easier to (loosely!) fold the dough into quarters, put it into the pan with the dough-corner in the center, and then unfold it.

This crust covered the pan without having to roll it as thin as tissue paper. We even had a few extra offcuts, though not enough to make an extra small turnover for myself. But most crucially, the crust fit the pan size that it claims.

The recipe tells us to "flute or crimp edge; perforate crust with fork." We actually managed to flute almost all the way around the pan (there were a few thin spots). 

 

I then pricked it with a fork even though I usually don't bother with that. In my experience, fork-pricking doesn't make any difference. Instead, it's best to follow Delia's advice and just check the oven about halfway through the time. As she says, "And if you find it starts to rise up a bit-- have a look about halfway through! And just sort of slap it down again or prick it again with a fork. It'll be perfectly all right." Well, I looked in the oven about halfway through the time and our crust definitely needed to be slapped down.

On the bright side, we knew our creation would live up to its typewritten title: "Flaky pie crust." However, almost all of our lovely fluting disappeared in the oven. But if we look at a section that didn't sag, you can see the lovely layers that awaited the upcoming pie.

Because my completionist streak attacks me at the most inconvenient times, I was going to make a pie at some later date using this last article:

But then I looked at the ingredient amounts (½ cup shortening, 1½ cups flour) and realized that we've been inadvertently following this one ever since I used the directions from Mrs. George O. Thurn's book. She writes the same recipe, doubled: 

A Book of Selected Recipes, Mrs. George O. Thurn, 1934

Incidentally, she also writes to "mix water in with knife," which echoes our other article's instruction to mix in the water with a spatula, "chopping and the turning back until the mixture is formed into a ball of dough." Delia Smith also uses a knife in her video. So the instruction works, but I had to see it before it made sense. At any rate, we can see Mrs. Thurn's happy results here:

Mrs. Thurn makes the kind of pie crust people don't leave behind on the plate. But getting to what we made today:

This recipe does in fact fill out a pan better than one from the biggest article my great-grandmother pasted onto the page. And true to the recipe's title, it was indeed very flaky. 

I think I did this page in the right order: first, learning from the two newspaper articles, then applying our lessons to the short recipe in the bottom corner. More importantly, we got a lot of pie out of completing this whole page.