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Dessert

Plain Short Crust Made with Butter

A simple short crust pastry made with butter, water, flour, and optional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour 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 Short Crust Made with Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan with the water.

  2. Heat the flour in a pan until hot.

  3. Mix the hot flour with the cold butter using a knife.

  4. Pour the melted butter into the mixture and stir well.

Finish and bake

  1. Roll out the dough, place it over the fruit, and bake 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.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour 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 once mixed with fat and liquid.
Butter
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and short, rather than tough.
Water
Adds moisture so the dough holds together when rolled.

The step that matters

Pour the melted butter into the mixture and stir well. Fat coats the flour particles and limits gluten formation. Stirring the melted butter in evenly keeps the dough tender; unevenly distributed fat leaves dry pockets and uneven texture.

“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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