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String Paste, for Stringing Tartlets, &C

A dough made from flour, butter, and cold water used to string tartlets before baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

String Paste, for Stringing Tartlets, &C

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, mix flour and butter with your hands.

  2. Add a little cold water until the mixture holds together.

  3. Knead the dough on a floured surface until it becomes stringy.

Shape and finish

  1. Cut the dough into small pieces and roll them out.

  2. Draw the rolled pieces into fine strings and lay them across your tartlets before baking.

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 once it is mixed with water.
Butter
Adds fat that keeps the dough tender and helps it hold its shape.
Cold water
Brings the flour and butter together into a dough that can be kneaded.

The step that matters

Knead until stringy. Kneading develops gluten in the flour, which gives the dough the stretch needed to draw into fine strings. Kneading too little leaves it crumbly and unable to hold a thin string 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.

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