Skip to main content
Dessert

Butter Crust for Puddings

A butter and flour dough used as a crust for fruit or meat puddings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Butter Crust for Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, lightly break the butter into the flour.

  2. Add the salt and mix well.

  3. Gradually add cold water to form a dough.

Shape

  1. Roll out the dough as needed for your pudding.

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. Butter + meattop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Flour + meattop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 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 main structure of the dough, giving the crust its body.
Unsalted butter
Rubbed into the flour to add fat, tenderness and flakiness to the crust.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water. Water added gradually and kept cold lets the dough come together without overworking it. Overworking develops gluten and makes the crust tough, while warm water can soften the butter before baking.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes