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Pie Crust with Lard

A simple pie crust made with flour, lard, butter, salt, baking powder, and milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pie Crust with Lard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder together.

  2. Rub the lard and butter into the flour until it is dry and crumbly.

  3. Moisten with 2 tablespoons of milk, just enough to make the mixture cling together.

  4. Divide the dough, taking enough for the bottom crust.

Shape the crust

  1. Flour the rolling pin and roll the dough into a thin round shape.

  2. Fit the crust into the pie plate, patting down to remove air bubbles.

  3. Cut the crust with a knife using the plate edge as a guide.

  4. Crimp the edges to prevent filling from overflowing.

Other crust options

  1. For a one-crust pie, use 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of lard.

  2. For a two-crust pie, roll out the remaining dough to ½ inch thickness, spread with cold butter, and fold into a small square.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the crust when mixed with liquid.
Lard
Shortens the dough, keeping it tender and flaky by coating flour particles.
Butter
Adds flavour and helps create flaky layers in the crust.
Milk
Moistens the flour so the dough holds together.

The step that matters

Moistening the dough. Too much milk makes the dough tough and sticky, since extra liquid lets gluten develop. Add only enough to make the mixture cling together, so the crust stays tender.

“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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