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Plain Pie Crust

A simple pie crust made with pastry flour, salt, lard, butter, and ice water.

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 ↓

Plain Pie Crust

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. In a bowl, combine the pastry flour and salt.

  2. Add the lard and butter, and rub them into the flour until well mixed.

  3. Gradually add ice water until the mixture forms a stiff dough.

Roll out

  1. Proceed to roll out the dough for your pies.

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

Pastry flour
Provides the structure that holds the crust together when baked.
Lard
Coats flour particles to keep the crust tender and flaky.
Butter
Adds flavor and fat that creates flaky layers as it stays in pieces.
Ice water
Hydrates the flour into a dough while keeping the fat cold and firm.

The step that matters

Gradually add ice water. Adding too much water at once makes the dough sticky and tough, because the flour's gluten develops too much. Adding it slowly until the dough just holds together keeps the crust tender and flaky.

“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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