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Raised Crusts for Meat Pies

A simple crust dough made by boiling water with lard and butter, then adding flour to form a dough.

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 Crusts for Meat Pies

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil water with fine lard and fresh dripping or butter.

  2. While hot, mix in enough flour to form a dough.

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

Lard
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and short.
Dripping or butter
Adds fat and flavour that enriches the crust's texture.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour into the hot liquid. Hot water and fat must be combined with flour while still hot so the starch gelatinises and the dough stays pliable. If it cools, the dough becomes stiff and hard to shape.

“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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