Skip to main content
Dessert

Pastry for Meat-pies

A simple pastry dough for meat pies made with flour, lard, baking soda, and sour milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Pastry for Meat-pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. In a large bowl, combine the flour and lard until crumbly.

  2. Dissolve the baking soda in the sour milk.

Combine and mix

  1. Add the sour milk mixture to the flour and lard.

  2. Mix gently with a knife until just combined.

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).

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

All-purpose flour
Provides the structure that holds the pastry together once it is baked.
Lard
Coats flour particles to limit gluten, giving the pastry a short, tender texture.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the sour milk to release gas, helping the pastry rise and lighten.
Sour milk
Supplies moisture to bind the dough and its acid activates the baking soda.

The step that matters

Mix gently until just combined. Overmixing develops gluten in the flour, which makes the pastry tough instead of tender. Stop as soon as the dough comes together.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes