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Short Paste for Fruit Tarts, Etc

A stiff short pastry dough made from flour, butter, sugar, egg yolk, baking powder, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Paste for Fruit Tarts, Etc

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Rub the flour and butter together until smooth.

  2. Add the sugar, egg yolk, and baking powder.

  3. Mix with cold water to form a very stiff paste.

Finish

  1. Roll out the paste and use as needed.

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. Rice + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Flour + ricetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,611 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 pastry as its gluten network sets.
Butter
Coats the flour particles, giving the pastry a tender, short texture and rich flavour.
Rice flour
Contains no gluten, so it makes the pastry finer and more crumbly.
Caster sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the pastry brown lightly.
Egg yolk
Adds fat and richness and helps bind the dough.
Baking powder
Releases gas to give the pastry a slight lift and lighter texture.

The step that matters

Mix with cold water to form a very stiff paste. Adding too much water or working the dough for too long develops gluten, which makes the pastry tough. Keeping the paste stiff and the water cold keeps the butter solid and the texture short.

“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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