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Dessert

Lemon Takts

A lemon tart with raisins, sugar, flour, and water, baked in a crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Takts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the lemons as you would for pies.

  2. Seed and chop the raisins.

Make the filling

  1. Mix all ingredients together and boil.

Assemble and bake

  1. Place a crust in tart tins.

  2. Fill the tins with the mixture and bake.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Lemon + raisintop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Flour
Thickens the filling as its starch swells and sets when heated in the boiling liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, balancing the sharpness of the lemons.
Lemons
Provide acidity and fragrant citrus flavour.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and a chewy texture to the filling.

The step that matters

Boil the filling fully. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in boiling liquid and swells. If the mixture is not boiled long enough, the starch stays raw, leaving the filling thin and floury-tasting instead of set.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, raisin, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Datesfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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