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Dessert

Sand Tarts

A sweet pastry made with butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and topped with cinnamon, sugar, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Sand Tarts

Ingredients

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 the dough

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, cream together the butter and sugar.

  3. Add the beaten eggs, water, and baking powder, mixing well.

  4. Gradually add enough flour to form a dough that can be rolled out thin.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the dough and cut it into squares.

  2. Brush the tops with egg white and sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon, and chopped almonds.

  3. Bake until lightly golden.

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. Cinnamon + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to give the cookies tenderness and a rich flavor.
Sugar
Creams with the butter for texture and adds sweetness and browning on the surface.
Eggs
Bind the dough and add richness and structure as they set in the oven.
Baking powder
Releases gas in the dough, giving a light lift to the baked cookies.

The step that matters

Gradually add enough flour. Adding flour slowly lets you stop once the dough can be rolled out thin. Too much flour makes the dough stiff and tough, while too little leaves it sticky and hard to cut into clean squares.

“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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