Name: Puff-paste Tarts
Ingredients: puff pastry; 1 egg; jelly or fruit butter

Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Puff-paste Tarts

Ingredients

puff pastry
1 egg
jelly or fruit butter

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.

Prepare

Roll out the puff pastry to ½ inch thick.
Cut the pastry into square pieces.
Brush the tops with beaten egg.
Fold the corners of each square to the center.

Bake and serve

Bake in a solid oven at 400°F (200°C).
Place a small portion of jelly or fruit butter in the center before serving.

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 + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff pastry: Its layers of fat and dough puff into flaky, airy structure when baked.
Egg: Beaten egg on the surface promotes browning and a glossy finish.
Jelly or fruit butter: Adds sweetness and fruit flavor to the centre of each tart.

“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.