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Light Paste for Cheese-cakes, &C

A light, stiff paste made from egg white, flour, hot water, and butter, used as a base for cheesecakes.

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

Light Paste for Cheese-cakes, &C

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Beat the egg white until frothy.

  2. Mix the frothy egg white with hot water to form a stiff paste with the flour.

Roll and layer

  1. Roll the paste very thin.

  2. Dot the surface with small pieces of butter and dredge with flour.

  3. Roll the paste tightly with your hands.

  4. Roll it out again and repeat the process with the remaining butter.

  5. After the third rolling, the paste is ready.

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. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

Fine flour
Forms the structure of the stiff paste as its gluten develops during rolling.
Egg white
Whipped to a froth, it traps air that helps the paste lighten.
Butter
Forms separate fat layers between the rolled sheets, which separate into flaky layers when baked.

The step that matters

Repeating the rolling with butter. Butter must stay in distinct layers rather than melting into the dough. If it softens too much, it blends into the paste and the layers fuse, losing the flaky, light texture the method is built to create.

“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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