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Dessert

Tart Crust

A cold dough made from lard, flour, salt, sugar, cream of tartar, egg white, baking soda, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Tart Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix lard with 1 cup of flour.

  2. Add salt, sugar, and cream of tartar.

  3. Beat the egg white and mix with ice water and baking soda.

  4. Combine all ingredients and keep the dough cold.

Roll

  1. Roll out the dough to ¼ inch thick.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Cream + flourtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Lard
Fat that shortens the dough, keeping it tender and flaky by coating flour strands.
Egg white
Adds protein for structure and helps bind the dough together.
Cream of tartar
Acidifies the mixture, stabilising the egg white and tenderising the crust.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the mixture to lighten the crust slightly.
Ice water
Supplies moisture for binding while staying cold to keep the fat solid.

The step that matters

Keep the dough cold. Cold lard stays in solid pieces that melt during baking, creating flaky layers. If the dough warms, the fat softens into the flour and the crust turns greasy and tough.

“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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