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Crust for Raised Pies

A dough crust for raised pies made with water, lard, butter, flour, and glazed with egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 ↓

Crust for Raised Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil water with fine lard and fresh dripping or butter.

  2. Mix in enough flour to form a stiff paste, kneading until smooth.

  3. Soak the paste in a cloth or under a pan until nearly cold.

Shape and fill

  1. Shape the paste with your hands to form the crust, ensuring it is thick enough to hold the filling.

  2. Fill the pie with meat, place the lid on, and seal the edges.

  3. Glaze the top with egg white before baking.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour 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
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and short.
Fresh dripping or butter
Adds fat and flavour, contributing to a rich, tender crust.
Flour
Forms the structure of the paste, which sets firm as it cools.
Egg white
Gives the top a glossy, golden sheen when baked.

The step that matters

Soaking the paste until nearly cold. The paste must be cool enough to hold its shape when hand-raised. Hot paste is soft and slumps, while paste left to cool fully stiffens and becomes hard to shape and seal.

“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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