Skip to main content
Bread

Raised Crust for Meat Pies, or Fowls, &C.

A raised crust for meat pies, made from water, lard, butter, flour, and egg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Raised Crust for Meat Pies, or Fowls, &C.

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Boil water with lard and dripping or butter.

  2. Mix the hot mixture with enough flour to form a stiff paste.

  3. Knead and beat the paste until smooth.

  4. Soak a lump of the paste in a cloth until near cold.

Shape and fill

  1. Roll the paste to a proper thickness and cut out the top and bottom of the pie, plus a long piece for the sides.

  2. Cement the bottom to the sides with egg, pinching them together.

  3. Fill the pie and place the cover on, pinching it to the side crust.

  4. If using a tin form, butter it and bake after filling and covering.

Bake

  1. Return to the oven for an additional 15 minutes if the sides are too light.

  2. Brush the top with egg using a feather.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Flour
Forms the structure of the stiff paste that holds the pie's shape.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and short.
Dripping or butter
Adds fat and flavour to the paste, making it richer and more tender.
Water
Hydrates the flour and, when boiled with fat, helps form a workable paste.
Egg
Acts as a glue to seal the pieces together and browns the crust when brushed on top.

The step that matters

Soak the paste until near cold. Hot-water paste is soft and hard to handle. Letting it cool until near cold firms the fat so the paste can be rolled and shaped without tearing or slumping.

“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.

More pie crust recipes

Plain 21Dough 15Flaky 14Raised 13Potato 10Chicken 5 See all 223 →

You might also like

CornbreadCornbread345 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding336 recipesMilk Bread RollsMilk Bread Rolls242 recipesPotato BreadPotato Bread124 recipes