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Dessert

Short Crust

A short crust pastry made with flour, butter, sugar, egg yolk, baking powder, salt, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Short Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder into a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter until the mixture is very fine.

  3. Add the sugar.

Bind and shape

  1. Beat the egg yolk with a little cold water.

  2. Mix the pastry to a firm consistency with the yolk mixture.

  3. Knead lightly until smooth.

  4. Roll out to the desired thickness.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 pastry once bound with liquid.
Butter
Rubbed into the flour to create a tender, crumbly texture by coating flour particles.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the dough together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and gentle browning to the finished crust.
Baking powder
Provides a small amount of lift so the pastry is not dense.

The step that matters

Rubbing in the butter. If the butter is rubbed in too coarsely or warms up, it will not coat the flour evenly, and the pastry can turn tough or greasy. Working the butter in until very fine keeps the crust short and crumbly.

“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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