Name: Pie Crust for Four Ten-inch Pies
Ingredients: 1 quart all-purpose flour; 1½ cups butter (or ¾ cup butter and ¼ cup lard, or ½ cup butter and ½ cup lard); a little water; additional flour for dusting

Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Pie Crust for Four Ten-inch Pies

Ingredients

1 quart all-purpose flour
1½ cups butter (or ¾ cup butter and ¼ cup lard, or ½ cup butter and ½ cup lard)
a little water
additional flour for dusting

Directions

Make the dough

Combine the flour with the butter (or butter and lard) until well mixed.
Moisten the mixture with a little water.
Spread the dough into a sheet about 1 inch thick and 10 to 12 inches wide.
Spread ½ cup of butter (or butter and lard) on the surface.
Dust with flour from a dredging box.
Roll the dough into a log about 4 inches in diameter.

Portion and shape

Cut the log into 8 pieces for tops and bottoms.
Turn each piece on its side and roll out to fit the pie plate.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour: Forms the structure of the dough once moistened and worked.
Butter: Creates flaky layers as it stays in pieces and melts in the oven.
Lard: Adds tenderness and flakiness to the crust as an alternative or partial fat.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.