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Dessert

Pastry for Meat Pies

A simple pastry dough made with flour, salt, water, and lard or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Pastry for Meat Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour onto a pastry board and form it into a circle.

  2. Add the salt and water, then mix to create a soft, smooth dough.

  3. Cover the dough with a cloth and let it rest for 10 minutes.

Laminate the pastry

  1. Wash the lard or butter in cold water, then dry it with a cloth.

  2. Roll the lard or butter into a flat shape on a floured board.

  3. Roll out the dough to a slightly larger shape than the lard or butter.

  4. Place the lard or butter on the dough and wrap the dough around it.

  5. Roll out the wrapped dough to a thickness of ¼ inch.

  6. Fold the dough in thirds, then roll it out again.

  7. Turn the dough from right to left and roll it out again.

  8. Fold the dough in thirds twice more, rolling it out each time.

  9. The pastry is now 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 dough when mixed with water.
Lard or butter
Creates flaky layers by staying separate from the dough during rolling and folding.
Water
Hydrates the flour so the dough becomes soft and cohesive.

The step that matters

Rolling the fat into the dough. The lard or butter must stay in a cohesive sheet between dough layers. If it softens or breaks through the dough, the layers blend and the pastry loses its flakiness.

“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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