Skip to main content
Dessert

French-paste, for Raised Pies

A dough made from flour, butter, salt, and cold water used for raised pies.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

French-paste, for Raised Pies

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place the flour on a clean surface and make a well in the center.

  2. Add the salt, cold water, and butter into the well.

  3. Mix the ingredients together with your hands to form a firm paste.

Knead

  1. Gather the paste to the edge of the surface and knead it with the palms of your hands, applying force to break and divide it.

  2. Sprinkle a few drops of water over the paste and knead it again, repeating this process three to four times.

  3. Gather the paste into a ball, wrap it in a clean cloth, and knead it by pressing with your elbow until ready to use.

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).

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 structure of the dough, providing the body that holds the paste together.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and helps it stay flaky when rolled.
Cold water
Brings the flour together into a workable dough while keeping the fat firm.

The step that matters

Adding the cold water and butter to the flour well. Keeping the butter cold and in pieces creates layers of fat that give a flaky texture. Warm butter blends into the flour and makes the dough greasy and tough.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes