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Dessert

Tart Crust

A fried pastry dough made from flour, lard, sugar, water, and egg white, cut into knots and sprinkled with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Tart Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub together the flour and lard.

  2. Add the sugar and the well-beaten egg.

  3. Mix in the water.

Shape and fry

  1. Roll out the dough until it is as thin as pie crust.

  2. Cut into narrow strips.

  3. Tie each strip into 2 or 3 knots.

  4. Fry in hot lard.

  5. Sprinkle with white sugar while hot.

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 + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Flour and egg 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

Flour
Forms the structure that holds the dough together.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the dough tender and flaky.
Egg white
Binds the dough and adds structure.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the dough and the sugared finish.

The step that matters

Fry in hot lard. Frying in hot lard is easy to get wrong. Lard that is too cool lets the strips soak up grease and turn heavy; lard that is too hot browns them before they cook through. Hot fat seals the surface quickly, keeping the strips crisp.

“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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