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To Make Short Crust Pastry

A short crust pastry dough made with butter, flour, salt, optional sugar, baking powder, 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 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 ↓

To Make Short Crust Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Combine flour, butter, salt, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Rub together with your fingers until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

  3. Add baking powder and mix well.

  4. Gradually add cold water, mixing with a fork until a dough forms.

  5. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and knead gently, folding in the edges until smooth.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough lightly to your desired size and thickness, using minimal flour.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) until golden.

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).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough once hydrated with water.
Butter
Rubbed into flour to create tenderness and a crumbly, flaky texture.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven to lift and lighten the pastry.
Cold water
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together without developing excess gluten.

The step that matters

Gradually add cold water. Adding water slowly and keeping it cold limits gluten development and keeps fat solid. Too much water or warm water makes the pastry tough and greasy rather than short and 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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