Skip to main content
Dessert

Sand Tarts

A sweet pastry made from butter, brown sugar, eggs, sour milk, baking soda, flour, white sugar, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Sand Tarts

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.

Make the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Cream together the butter and brown sugar.

  3. Add the lightly beaten egg yolks.

  4. Dissolve the baking soda in the sour milk and add it to the mixture.

  5. Gradually mix in the flour, sifting after measuring.

Shape and decorate

  1. Flour your work surface and roll the dough very thin.

  2. Cut the dough into small shapes as desired.

  3. Beat the egg whites until light and brush them over the cut shapes.

  4. Mix white sugar and cinnamon together and sprinkle on top.

Bake

  1. Bake until golden in the preheated oven.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a moist, caramel-like flavour to the dough.
Butter
Provides fat that makes the tart crisp and tender.
Eggs
Egg yolks enrich and bind the dough; whites give a light, glossy top.
Sour milk
Its acidity reacts with the baking soda to help the dough rise.
Baking soda
Reacts with the sour milk to produce gas that lightens the dough.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure that holds the rolled, cut shapes together.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin and watch the bake. Thin dough has little mass, so it browns quickly and can scorch. Rolling it evenly thin also ensures the tarts bake uniformly and stay crisp rather than soft in the middle.

“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

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes