I watch a lot of cooking videos and the first thing any pastry chef will tell you is to keep your butter cold if you want flaky pastries. If you don’t the butter will melt out and break creating an oily mess.
I know butter based pies and pastries are a huge part of Anglo European cuisines dating back to the Middle Ages.
How in the world did French pastry makers laminate dough for croissants or London pie shops make flaky pie crust with out ice or a freezer?
(From a European/westernperspective) Most pastry before refrigeration would be made using lard not butter. In fact a for a good chunk of history pastry wasn't really eaten. Known as a coffin (because it was usually full of meat a.k.a dead animals) it was largely used as a cooking vessel/preservation method. It could help keep fresh meat 'fresh' for about a week because the pastry did seal out some air and the contents were somewhat sterilized during cooking. You start to see what we today would recognize as pastry in about the late 18th early 19th century. Refrigeration wasn't really a thing outside the ice houses of the rich, but the rich were really the only ones eating such fancy desserts. Even so, they did not use a refrigerator known as a cold box untill closer to the end of the 18th century. The most common way of working with temperature sensitive items would be to work in a cool shaded room or even in a cold room (a cellar like place) on marble which stays cool.
This is an interesting question! I don't have an answer for you, but you could try r/AskFoodHistorians