Skip to main content
Dessert

Petits Fours

Petits fours are small pastry rounds made from flour, butter, salt, and water, glazed with egg and sprinkled with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Petits Fours

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. On a clean surface, make a well in the flour and add the butter and salt.

  3. Gradually mix in water to form a dough that can be rolled out.

Shape and glaze

  1. Roll the dough to ¼ inch thick and cut into 4-inch rounds.

  2. Glaze the tops with beaten egg and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Prick the dough with a fork and place on a lightly greased baking sheet.

Bake

  1. Bake until lightly golden.

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.

  1. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Forms the gluten network that gives the dough its structure once water is added.
Butter
Adds fat that shortens gluten strands, giving the pastry a tender, crumbly texture.
Egg
Brushed on top, it promotes browning and gives the tops a glossy finish.

The step that matters

Gradually mix in water. Adding water slowly lets the flour absorb just enough liquid to form a rollable dough. Too much water makes the dough sticky and tough, while too little leaves it dry and cracked when rolled.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes