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Dessert

Plain Pastry

A simple pastry dough made with flour, butter or lard, salt, baking powder, and cold water.

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

Plain Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the baking powder into the flour.

  2. If using lard, mix it with the salt.

  3. Add cold water gradually until the mixture holds together.

Shape

  1. Roll out the dough thinly and line a pie pan.

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 + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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 dough when mixed with water.
Butter or lard
Coats flour particles to keep the pastry tender and flaky.
Baking powder
Releases gas that gives the pastry a light rise.

The step that matters

Add cold water gradually until the mixture holds together. Too much water or overworking the dough lets gluten develop, making the pastry tough. Stopping as soon as the dough holds together keeps it tender. Cold water also keeps the fat solid, which helps create flaky layers.

“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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