What does it mean when a recipe says to "cut butter into the dry ingredients"?

To start, you need butter that's refrigerator-cold. If you store your butter in the freezer (as I do), you'll need to take it out of the freezer and put it in the normal refrigerator hours and hours before you start to use it -- half a day is what mine needs, but of course the time for your butter depends on how cold you keep your freezer and how cold you keep your refrigerator.

The other thing to chill is the bowl in which you're going to work. Take it out when it's good and cold, and wipe it off with a dishtowel if moisture is condensing on the surface.

Put the dry ingredients (typically some kind of flour and other stuff) into the bowl and stir them up.

Lay out your tools: a sharp knife, a pastry blender, and a fork (an ordinary table fork is fine).

OK, now take the butter out of the refrigerator and unwrap it. With the sharp knife, cut the right amount of butter into pats, dropping them directly into the bowl. (A stick of butter is half a cup, or 8 Tablespoons, etc.) Put any butter you're not using right away back into the refrigerator.

Now, with the sharp knife still in your dominant hand, take the pastry blender in your helper hand. Scrunch the pastry blender down into the pats of butter, and use the sharp knife to clean the butter off the scraper.

Keep going till the butter is no longer making enormous blobs on the pastry blender. Then switch hands, taking the pastry blender in your dominant hand and the knife in your helper hand.

Am I in a big hurry?

Depends on how warm the room is. You want to keep the butter cold, or whatever you're making will come out greasy. If you can feel with your tools that the butter is starting to get soft, stick everything in the refrigerator and wait 15 minutes, then start in again.

Am I worried about overworking the dough? What is "overworking the dough," anyway?

Squeezing and stretching a mixture of wheat flour and liquid causes the dough to form gluten, the stuff that makes bread dough strong and elastic; the purpose of kneading is primarily to form gluten. For pastry dough, the kind into which you typically cut butter, a little gluten is good but a lot of gluten is bad. Overworked pastry dough will be tough and oily.

Because you cut butter into dry ingredients, there's not much liquid to worry about, but there is some in the butter. Higher-fat butters, like the European-style butters now on the market in the United States, have less moisture and so are easier to work with in making pastry. Ditto lard. (Don't use supermarket lard, which is full of trans fats, but if you enjoy making pastry you owe it to yourself to try some with home-rendered lard. Yum.)

So am I done now?

When the flour has taken on a yellowish tinge and the butter is in bits no larger then a peppercorn, you're done cutting the butter into the dry ingredients.

What's the fork for?

Your next step in whatever recipe you're following is going to be adding liquid, and now you do need to start worrying about overworking the dough. A fork is a better tool than a spoon.

Is there an easier way?

More and more these days I cut butter into dry ingredients in my food processor, then add the wet ingredients down the feeder tube. It's oh so easy to overwork the dough in the food processor, but the more I use it, the better I get at gauging the time accurately, by sight. When the dough is just barely beginning to ball up, I turn the processor off, dump the dough out, and finish working it by hand (heel of hand, actually). Seems to work pretty well.

It's nice to know the old way when you're in your tent at a wilderness campground or staying with friends who don't cook -- but then how likely is it that they have a pastry blender?