Name: Tarts of Preserved Fruit
Ingredients: rich pie crust; preserved fruit; 1 egg white; white sugar

Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tarts of Preserved Fruit

Ingredients

rich pie crust
preserved fruit
1 egg white
white sugar

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Assemble

Line small plates with a rich pie crust and form a rim.
Fill the crusts with any kind of preserved fruit.
Brush the tops with the egg white.
Sift a little white sugar over the tarts.

Bake

Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for about three minutes.

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.

Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together122,807 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Rich pie crust: Forms the structure and edge that holds the fruit and becomes crisp and golden.
Preserved fruit: Provides the main filling, adding sweetness and concentrated fruit flavor.
Egg white: Brushed on top, it gives a glossy sheen and helps the surface brown.
White sugar: Adds sweetness and helps the sugared top caramelize and brown in the oven.

“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.