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Raised Crust for Meat Pies, or Fowls, &C.

A raised crust made from water, lard, butter, and flour, used for meat pies and fowls.

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 ↓

Raised Crust for Meat Pies, or Fowls, &C.

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil water with lard and dripping or butter.

  2. While hot, mix in flour until the paste is stiff and smooth.

  3. Knead and beat the paste with a rolling pin until smooth.

  4. Soak a lump of the paste in a cloth or under a pan until near cold.

Shape the crust

  1. Roll the paste to the proper thickness and cut out the top and bottom of the pie, plus a long piece for the sides.

  2. Cement the bottom to the sides with egg, pinching them together.

  3. Apply egg between the edges of the paste to help it adhere.

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).

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 paste, stiffening it as it binds with the hot liquid.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the paste short and tender when cooled.
Dripping or butter
Adds fat and flavor, contributing to a rich, tender crust.
Water
Hydrates the flour and melts the fats into a workable paste.

The step that matters

Soak the paste until near cold. Hot paste is too soft to hold its shape when rolled and raised. Cooling it until nearly cold lets the fat firm up so the walls stand without slumping.

“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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