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Short Paste for Raised Pies

A short pastry dough made from flour, butter, salt, and cold water.

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 ↓

Short Paste for Raised Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the flour on a clean surface and make a well in the center.

  2. Add salt, butter, and cold water to the well.

  3. Mix the ingredients with your hands to form a firm paste.

Knead and rest

  1. Knead the paste by pressing and folding it, sprinkling a few drops of water as needed, for a total of four times.

  2. Gather the paste, wrap it in a clean cloth, and press it together to prepare 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 that holds the pastry together.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the pastry tender and flaky.
Cold water
Moistens the flour so the paste binds into a dough.

The step that matters

Kneading the paste. Kneading only a few times with small amounts of water keeps the paste from becoming tough. Too much handling develops gluten, which makes the pastry dense and hard rather than tender.

“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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