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Pastry for Fruit Tart

A pastry dough for fruit tart made with flour, salt, sugar, butter, egg yolk, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Pastry for Fruit Tart

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Sift the flour onto a clean surface and make a well in the center.

  2. Add the salt and sugar into the well.

  3. Cut the butter into small pieces and add it to the mixture.

  4. Add the egg yolk and knead everything together.

  5. Gradually add water until the mixture forms a smooth, stiff paste.

Rest

  1. Wrap the dough in a moist cloth and set aside until needed.

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. Sugar + buttertop 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 main structure of the dough once hydrated.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the pastry tender and rich in texture.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps bind the dough together.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and contributes to light browning in the baked crust.

The step that matters

Gradually add water until the mixture forms a smooth, stiff paste.. Adding too much water at once can make the dough sticky and tough, since flour proteins develop gluten when wet and worked. Adding water slowly lets you stop once the dough just comes together, keeping the pastry tender.

“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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