Skip to main content
Dessert

Short Crust

A pastry dough made from powdered sugar, flour, butter, egg yolks, cream, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Short Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Mix the sugar and flour in a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter until no separate bits remain.

  3. Beat the egg yolks into some cream.

  4. Combine the mixture to form a smooth paste.

Roll

  1. Roll the paste thin.

Alternative method

  1. Alternatively, mix sugar and flour, add butter, and make a paste with cold water.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 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 structure of the pastry as the base that sets when baked.
Butter
Coats flour particles to shorten gluten, giving the pastry a tender, crumbly texture.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the dough, adding fat and colour.
White powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pastry brown lightly in the oven.

The step that matters

Combine the mixture to form a smooth paste. Handling dough too much develops gluten, which makes shortcrust tough rather than short. Mix only until the dough just holds together, keeping the butter in fine pieces for a crumbly result.

“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.

More shortcrust pastry recipes

Dough 4 See all 33 →

You might also like

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