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Dessert

Biscuit Paste

A stiff paste made from flour, sugar, egg yolks, and milk used to line tarts and custard molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Biscuit Paste

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Combine flour, sugar, and egg yolks in a bowl.

  2. Add milk and mix until a stiff paste forms.

Line and bake

  1. Use this paste for tarts baked in pans or for lining moulds.

  2. For custards, line small moulds with the paste, fill with flour, and bake until hard.

  3. Remove flour, fill with custard, and bake until set.

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 + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Provides the main structure that holds the paste together and gives it body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the paste while setting firm when baked.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to browning of the baked paste.
Milk
Moistens the flour so it forms a stiff, workable paste.

The step that matters

Baking the lined moulds until hard. The paste must bake fully so it sets firm and holds its shape. Underbaked paste stays soft and can collapse or leak when the custard is added.

“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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