Skip to main content
Dessert

Bread-and-butter Pastry

A puff pastry pastry with a buttered crust, lightly sweetened, and filled with preserved cherries, greengage jam, or currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Prepare the pastry

  1. Roll out the puff pastry to ⅙ inch thick and give it seven turns.

  2. Stamp out 18 circular pieces, 1½ inches in diameter.

  3. Place the pieces on a wet baking sheet.

  4. Stamp out smaller pieces, 1 inch in diameter.

  5. Cut out the centers of the smaller pieces.

  6. Wet the surface of the larger pieces.

  7. Place the smaller pieces on top of the larger pieces.

  8. Press down gently.

Bake and finish

  1. Brush the tops with beaten egg.

  2. Bake until light golden.

  3. Sprinkle fine sugar over them.

  4. Return to the oven for 1-2 minutes.

  5. Use a salamander to give a glossy finish before serving.

  6. 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 laminated layers of butter and dough puff into flaky, airy structure when baked.
Egg
Beaten egg brushed on top promotes browning and a glossy, golden surface.
Preserved cherries, greengage jam, or currant jelly
Adds sweetness and fruity acidity inside the pastry rings.

The step that matters

Keep the top ring lightly pressed and the pastry edges unsealed. Pressing too hard or wetting the wrong areas can squash the layers so they cannot rise, leaving dense pastry instead of flaky, well-defined rings.

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.

You might also like

Red Currant JellyRed Currant Jelly65 recipesCurrant Ice CreamCurrant Ice Cream32 recipesCurrant SherbetCurrant Sherbet9 recipesCurrant and Raspberry IceCurrant and Raspberry Ice7 recipes