Skip to main content
Dessert

Plain Pastry

A simple pastry dough made with Graham and all-purpose flour, cold sweet cream, and optional baking powder.

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

Why it works: Flour and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,481 recipes. Both carry acetaldehyde, which smells pungent, ethereal. The science ↓

Plain Pastry

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix together the Graham flour and all-purpose flour in a bowl.

  2. If using baking powder, add it to the flour mixture.

Make the dough

  1. Add the cold sweet cream in the proportion of 3 cups of flour to 1 scant cup of cream.

  2. Stir rapidly and lightly with a spoon without kneading.

  3. Gather the dough with your fingers.

  4. Place it in a cool place for 30 minutes before rolling out.

Roll and bake

  1. Roll and bake immediately.

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 + creamtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Graham flour
Provides the bulk of the dough and a nutty, coarse texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms gluten for structure, helping the dough hold together when rolled.
Cold sweet cream
Adds fat and moisture, and keeps the dough tender when kept cold.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the oven to lift the pastry and lighten its texture.

The step that matters

Stir rapidly and lightly without kneading. Overworking flour develops gluten, which makes pastry tough. Light, quick mixing keeps the dough tender, and keeping the cream cold preserves flakiness.

“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