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Paste for Meat Pies

A simple paste made of butter or lard, flour, and cold water used to make the crust for meat pies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Paste for Meat Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pastry

  1. Cut the butter, lard, or dripping into small pieces.

  2. Gradually mix in the flour.

  3. Rub the mixture together with your hands.

  4. Add cold water until a smooth paste forms.

Laminate the dough

  1. Roll out the paste flat.

  2. Fold the paste and roll it out again three times.

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

Butter, lard, or dripping
Fat that coats flour particles, creating a tender, flaky texture when rubbed in.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the pastry once mixed with water.
Cold water
Binds the flour and fat into a smooth dough without melting the fat.

The step that matters

Rubbing the fat into the flour. If the fat warms and melts into the flour instead of staying in small pieces, the pastry becomes greasy and loses its flakiness. Keeping the mixture cool and working it lightly helps the fat stay separate.

“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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