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Dessert

Light Paste for Tarts and Cheesecakes

A light pastry dough made with flour, butter, egg white, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Light Paste for Tarts and Cheesecakes

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Beat the egg white to a strong froth.

  2. Mix the froth with enough water to make a stiff paste with the flour.

  3. Roll the paste very thin.

Laminate with butter

  1. Dot one-third of the butter in small pieces over the paste.

  2. Dredge with some reserved flour and roll it up tightly.

  3. Roll it out again and repeat with the remaining butter.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 dough and, with water, the stiff paste that holds the layers.
Butter
Stays in separate layers during rolling, creating flaky texture as it melts and steam lifts the dough.
Egg white
Whipped to a froth, it adds air and light texture to the paste.

The step that matters

Roll the paste very thin. Thin sheets separated by butter layers let the dough bake into many flaky leaves. Thick paste produces a dense, less flaky crust.

“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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