Name: Short Crust, Plain
Ingredients: 1 pound flour; 6 ounces lard, clarified fat, or dripping; 2 teaspoons baking powder (heaped); ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); ½ cup water; 2 tablespoons sugar (optional, for fruit tarts)

Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Short Crust, Plain

Ingredients

1 pound flour
6 ounces lard, clarified fat, or dripping
2 teaspoons baking powder (heaped)
½ teaspoon coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
½ cup water
2 tablespoons sugar (optional, for fruit tarts)

Directions

Make the pastry

Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into a large bowl.
Rub in the fat until well combined.
Add the water and mix with a knife to form a smooth paste.

Shape and use

Roll out to your desired shape and thickness.
Use immediately.

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.

Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together92,116 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour: Forms the main structure of the pastry once mixed with liquid.
Lard: Fat that coats flour particles, making the pastry short and tender rather than tough.
Baking powder: Releases gas to give the pastry a light, slightly raised texture.
Water: Hydrates the flour so the mixture binds into a workable paste.

The step that matters

Rubbing in the fat. Rubbing the fat into the flour until fully combined coats the flour particles and limits gluten formation. Lumps of unincorporated fat or overworking the dough can make the pastry greasy or tough.

“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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Short Crust, Plain