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Dessert

Short Crust

A short crust pastry dough made with powdered sugar, flour, butter, egg yolks, cream, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Short Crust

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix powdered sugar and flour in a bowl.

  2. Rub in the butter until no separate bits remain.

  3. Beat the egg yolks into some cream. Mix the cream mixture into the flour mixture to form a smooth paste.

Shape and use

  1. Roll the dough thin and use as desired.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the main structure of the dough once mixed with liquid.
Butter
Rubbed into flour to create tenderness by coating flour particles and shortening the dough.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the dough into a smooth paste.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and fine texture, dissolving easily into the dough.

The step that matters

Rub in the butter until no separate bits remain. Cold butter rubbed into flour coats the flour and limits gluten development, which keeps the pastry short and tender. Overworking the dough or leaving large butter lumps gives uneven texture.

“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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