Name: Good Pie Crust
Ingredients: 1 cup all-purpose flour; ½ cup butter and lard mixed; ¼ teaspoon salt

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 ↓

Good Pie Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup butter and lard mixed
¼ teaspoon salt

Directions

Make the crust

Mix flour, butter, lard, and salt together.
Roll out the dough to fit a pie dish for both the upper and lower crust.

Bake

Bake the pie for 30 minutes with your desired filling.

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.

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

All-purpose flour: Forms the main structure of the dough as its proteins and starches set on baking.
Butter and lard mixed: Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and flaky by coating flour and separating its layers.

“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.