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To Make a Short Crust with Dripping

A short crust pastry made with all-purpose flour, clarified beef dripping, cold water, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

To Make a Short Crust with Dripping

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a large basin, combine the flour and salt.

  2. Break the clarified beef dripping into small pieces and add to the flour.

  3. Mix the ingredients until crumbly.

  4. Gradually add the cold water, mixing until a dough forms.

Shape

  1. Knead gently and roll out to fit your pie dish.

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 + beeftop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and beef barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once hydrated.
Clarified beef dripping
Fat that coats flour particles, keeping the pastry short and tender.
Very cold water
Binds the flour and fat into a dough while keeping the fat firm.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water. Adding water gradually and keeping it very cold keeps the fat in small solid pieces. Warm water or overworking develops gluten and makes the crust tough rather than short.

“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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