American pie crust was built on lard and butter for most of its history. A hydrogenated vegetable fat sold from 1911 changed the default in many kitchens, and the published food science still does not crown a single winner. Extension services, test kitchens and the shortening’s own maker each rank the three fats differently.
The oldest American cookbook already mixes its fats. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery, printed in Hartford in 1796, gives six puff pastes for tarts made with butter. Her paste No. 7, “for sweet meats,” rubs a third of a pound of butter and a pound of lard into two pounds of flour. Her pumpkin pudding goes into paste No. 7 or No. 3.
In 1911 Procter & Gamble put a new solid fat on the market and named it Crisco. It was cottonseed oil, hydrogenated until it set up like lard. The company’s own cookbook, The Story of Crisco, argued the case directly. It said the supply and quality of lard were falling and its price rising, warned that a pie made with lard meant eating “raw animal lard,” and told bakers that “Crisco makes tenderer crust than either lard or butter.”
Lard lost ground in the decades that followed. America’s Test Kitchen puts American lard consumption at nearly 15 pounds per person a year in the 1920s and about 1.5 pounds today, and ties the fall to vegetable shortening’s arrival and to health reports against animal fats. NPR’s account credits Crisco’s marketing and notes that the partially hydrogenated fats behind its texture were later linked to heart disease, which led the brand to change its formula. The brand later lent its name to the best-known pie contest: American Pie Council pages and releases call the event the APC Crisco National Pie Championships from 2006 through the 19th championships in 2013.
The science agrees on the mechanism and splits on the ranking. Utah State University Extension says fat waterproofs flour and slows gluten, that solid fats such as lard and hydrogenated shortening make a flakier crust than liquid fats, and that chilled fat works best. New Mexico State University’s Bernalillo County Extension says all-butter crusts have the best flavor, that shortening is easier to handle, and that lard produces the flakiest crust. King Arthur Baking’s tests reached different conclusions. Its 2013 bakeoff set lard aside because good, fresh lard is hard to find, and compared an all-butter crust with a butter-and-shortening crust: the blend was “just as tender and flaky as the butter crust, but without its light texture,” and the all-butter crust was lighter, with more defined flakes, which the author put down to butter’s water turning to steam. A 2019 King Arthur post, citing those tests, states that butter, shortening or lard make equally light and tender crusts and that an all-butter crust is flakier.
Leaf lard sits at the top of the lard question. America’s Test Kitchen describes it as mild in flavor with a higher melting point, which makes for extra-flaky crusts, and warns that recipes written for butter can turn dense when lard is swapped in. When the same kitchen tested supermarket crusts in 2017, its top pick was a refrigerated crust whose fat was listed as lard and modified lard.
Many working bakers split the difference. The NMSU extension booklet recommends half butter for flavor and half shortening or lard for flakiness, and Utah State’s own crust recipe uses two sticks of butter with a quarter cup of shortening.