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Dessert

Short Pastry

A simple pastry dough made from flour, butter or beef dripping, baking powder, salt or sugar, optional egg yolk, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Short Pastry

Oven, in the book's wordsA good oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Combine flour, butter, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Rub together until the mixture resembles bread crumbs.

  3. Add the egg yolk if using.

  4. Mix in enough cold water to form a very stiff dough.

Shape

  1. Turn the dough onto a floured board.

  2. Knead very lightly and roll out once only.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 pastry as its proteins combine with water to create a dough.
Butter
Coats the flour particles, shortening gluten strands so the pastry turns out tender and crumbly.
Baking powder
Releases gas during baking, giving the pastry a light, slightly open texture.
Cold water
Moistens the flour so the dough holds together without becoming sticky or elastic.

The step that matters

Knead very lightly and roll out once only.. Overworking or rerolling the dough develops gluten, which makes short pastry tough and hard instead of crisp and tender.

“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 short pastry recipes

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