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Dessert

Lard and Butter Pastry

A pastry made by mixing lard and butter with flour, then rolling and folding the dough.

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 ↓

Lard and Butter Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Rub the lard into the flour until well combined.

  2. Roll out the mixture on a floured surface.

Add the butter

  1. Roll out the butter on the board and dust with a little flour.

  2. Lift the floured butter onto the pastry, fold them together, and roll out once more.

Finish

  1. For best results, prepare in a cool place and use a marble slab if possible.

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

Lard
Rubbed into flour to shorten gluten and give the pastry a tender, crumbly texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the pastry as its proteins hydrate into gluten.
Butter
Laminated into the dough, creating layers and flakiness and adding rich flavor.

The step that matters

Keeping the fat cool while rolling. Lard and butter must stay cold so they stay in solid pieces. When they melt into the flour, the layers blend in 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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