Skip to main content
Dessert

Delicate Sugar Paste, for Tarts, or Rich Cheese-Cakes

A stiff sugar paste made from flour, butter, powdered sugar, and water, used for tarts or cheese cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Delicate Sugar Paste, for Tarts, or Rich Cheese-Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles grated bread.

  2. Sift the powdered sugar through a fine sieve and mix it well with the flour.

  3. Add enough boiling water to form a stiff paste.

  4. Optionally, add a little rose or orange-flower water for flavor.

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).

  2. Flour + sugartop 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).

  4. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Flour + rosetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,643 recipes

    Shared aroma: eugenol (clove, spicy).

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 structure of the paste once moistened with water.
Unsalted butter
Coats the flour particles, giving the paste richness and a tender, crumbly texture.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves finely into the paste for a smooth texture.

The step that matters

Add enough boiling water to form a stiff paste. Boiling water partly gelatinises the starch in the flour, which helps the paste bind. Adding too much water makes it sticky and hard to handle, while too little leaves it crumbly and unable to hold its 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.

You might also like

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