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Dessert

Bread-and-butter Pastry

A puff pastry pastry filled with preserved cherries, jam, or jelly, topped with sugar and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Bread-and-butter Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the pastry

  1. Roll out the puff pastry to ⅙ inch thick.

  2. Cut out 18 circular pieces, 1½ inches in diameter, and place them on a wet baking sheet.

  3. Cut out smaller circular pieces, 1 inch in diameter, and stamp out the centers.

  4. Wet the larger pieces with a brush, place the smaller pieces on top, and press down gently.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the tops with beaten egg and bake at 400°F (200°C) until light golden.

  2. Sprinkle sugar over the pastries and return to the oven for 1-2 minutes.

  3. Use a salamander or broiler to give a glossy finish.

  4. Fill with preserved cherries, greengage jam, or currant jelly before serving.

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. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  2. Egg + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Puff pastry
Its layers puff up in the oven, giving the pastry its light, flaky structure.
Egg
Beaten egg brushed on top browns the surface and gives a glossy sheen.
Sugar
Sprinkled on top, it caramelizes in the oven for sweetness and a crisp, browned finish.

The step that matters

Sprinkling sugar and returning to the oven. Sugar caramelizes quickly at high heat, so a short return of 1-2 minutes is needed. Left too long, it can burn and turn bitter before the pastry is cooked through.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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