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Butter Crust, for Boiled Puddings

A butter crust made by mixing flour and water, rolling thin, adding butter, dredging with flour, and folding to create a pastry for boiled puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Butter Crust, for Boiled Puddings

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Work the flour into a smooth paste with ½ pint of water using a knife.

  2. Roll the crust out rather thin.

Add the butter and fold

  1. Place the butter in small pieces over the crust.

  2. Dredge lightly with flour and fold the paste over.

Finish

  1. Roll out the crust once more, and it will be ready for use.

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).

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 structure of the paste, giving the crust the body to hold its shape.
Butter
Adds fat that coats the flour and keeps the crust tender and rich.

The step that matters

Rolling the butter into the paste. Spreading the butter in small pieces and rolling it out keeps it in separate layers. When the fat is blended too evenly into the flour, the crust loses the tenderness that layered fat produces.

“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.

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