Burlington Vermont 1875

July 17th 1875

Mama’s Pie Crust

2 handfulls of flour, suet (scooped up) enough for 1 pie, rub in lard stir it with ice water, not moist, don’t mould but squeeze it up.

Cream Pie Crust

1 cup sweet cream make’s two pies, pinch salt flour enough to mould out. 

I think this recipe is using lard and suet interchangeably, for a pastry I would use the lard over the suet.  Not sure about the scooped up, unless it means to scoop out a serving enough to make a crust, maybe a cup measure. 

Suet – It is the hard, raw fat from beef or mutton found around the kidneys and loins.  The high smoke point and fast melting temperature makes it perfect for deep frying and pastry making.  After rendering into tallow, it is used in cooking and baking such things as the traditional English Christmas pudding.  The long process of rendering it down to tallow, involves melting and simmering several times, cooling it down all to refine the suet to a usable state.  Suet requires refrigeration if it to be stored for any length of time. 

Do not confuse suet with all fat from the animals it can only be found around the heart and kidneys of cattle and sheep.  Nor should it be confused with drippings, which is the melted fats in the pan when cooking the meat. 

Pre-packaged suet that can be found today in the markets is mixed with flour and dehydrated to make it stable at room temperature. Some care is needed to use this for the old recipes, the proportions of flour to fat will alter the stated recipe.  Fresh suet can be bought in markets and must be coarsely grated to use; then must be refrigerated prior to use and used within a few days of buying it. 

Lard – Is a semi-solid white fat from pigs used as a cooking fat or a shortening.  It is prized for its properties of making pastries light and flaky, replacing butter in the recipes.  The leaf lard is from the “flare” visceral fat surrounding the kidneys and inside the loin.  With very little pork flavor it is perfect for use in baked goods; and since the early 1990 when trans-fats in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils became a concern for your health, it has had a resurgence of popularity as a “Natural” food. 

As well as baked goods It has been used in culinary recipes for centuries, often for game meats to add fat in the cooking process to very low-fat meats such as venison; by “Larding” a roast you insert the lard into the meat so it doesn’t dry out during cooking. 

DAILY RECIPES BY CALENDAR

As an ongoing feature here, I will add to this each day the recipes out of several books I have that are dated or from calendar books

A small leather covered calendar book from Burlington Vermont dated 1875.  It has all kinds of lovely handwritten dessert recipes; the front of the book has an overview of each month and a predictive weather chart, the difference of tie between Boston and New York, the value of gold and silver at the time and other interesting things like rates of postage. 

The list of names for the people who contributed recipes for these books are listed here;

https://kitchenrecipetreasures.com/2021/03/04/daily-recipes-by-calendar-family-names/

Visit my ebay store to find some great kitchen utensils and collectables to go along with these vintage and antique recipes.

https://www.ebay.com/str/ozziesattic720?_trksid=p2047675.l2563