Skip to main content
Dessert

Small Berry Roll

A pastry roll filled with berries, sugar, and butter, baked until done.

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

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 ↓

Small Berry Roll

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Make a cream pastry with 1 pint of flour and roll it thin.

  2. Spread the pastry with your choice of strawberries, blackberries, or raspberries.

  3. Sprinkle with sugar and butter, then roll it all together.

Bake

  1. Place in a pan, sprinkle the top with sugar and bits of butter.

  2. Add enough water to create plenty of juice.

  3. Cook in a 350°F (175°C) oven until well done.

  4. If there isn't enough juice, make a little extra sauce.

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. Sugar + buttertop 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 pastry dough that wraps the berries and holds the roll together.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the pastry and melts into the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the berries and helps them caramelize and brown on top.
Strawberries, blackberries, or raspberries
Provide the fruit filling, along with juice that softens and flavours the pastry.

The step that matters

Adding the water and checking the juice. Enough liquid must be present so the berries release juice and the pastry bakes moist rather than drying out. If juice runs short, a little extra sauce keeps the filling from scorching.

“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