Skip to main content
Dessert

Sand Tarts

A buttery pastry with sugar, eggs, nuts, and cinnamon, baked until lightly golden.

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

Why it works: Flour and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,341 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. 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.

Prepare the dough

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

  2. Rub the butter into the flour until well combined.

  3. Add the sugar and mix well.

  4. Wet the mixture with the egg whites and yolks.

  5. Roll the dough very thin and cut into diamond shapes.

Finish and bake

  1. Glaze the tops with the egg white.

  2. Sprinkle with chopped nuts and ground cinnamon.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Nuts + cinnamontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together487 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Flour + nutstop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,180 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

Butter
Rubbed into the flour to coat it and create a tender, crumbly texture.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough once bound with liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cookies brown during baking.
Egg whites
Bind the dough and add structure, and glaze the tops for a sheen.
Egg yolks
Add richness and fat, contributing to a tender dough.

The step that matters

Roll the dough very thin. Thin dough bakes through and turns crisp; thick pieces stay soft in the center and may not brown evenly, so the thickness should be uniform across all diamonds.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Pistachiofits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, sugar, egg, cinnamon. 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.

You might also like

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