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Dessert

Plain Paste

A simple pastry dough made with winter wheat flour, salt, lard, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Wheat and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,373 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Paste

four single crusts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.

  2. Rub the lard into the flour with your fingers or chop it in with a knife until very fine.

  3. Stir in the cold water a small portion at a time to keep the dough stiff.

  4. Turn the paste out on a floured board and knead very lightly for a moment.

Shape the crusts

  1. Divide the dough into quarters to make four single crusts.

  2. Roll each piece out separately, making it slightly larger than the pie plate.

  3. Place the rolled crusts on the plates loosely to prevent shrinking during baking.

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. Wheat + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,373 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Winter wheat flour
Forms the structure of the dough once moistened and worked.
Lard
Coats flour particles to tenderise the crust and keep layers short.
Cold water
Binds the flour into a dough without making it sticky or tough.

The step that matters

Stir in the cold water a small portion at a time. Adding water gradually lets you stop once the dough holds together. Too much water develops gluten and makes the crust tough and shrink-prone.

“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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