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Dessert

Lemon Tartlets

A baked tartlet filled with lemon custard topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Lemon Tartlets

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 custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the flour mixed with a little cold milk and heat again, stirring constantly.

  3. Pour the mixture over the beaten yolks and sugar, and cook for one minute.

  4. Remove from heat.

  5. Mix in the lemon juice and grated peel.

Assemble and bake

  1. Prepare baked tartlet shells in patty pans.

  2. Fill the shells with the lemon mixture.

  3. Make a meringue by whipping the egg whites with a little powdered sugar.

  4. Cover each tartlet with the meringue.

  5. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until the meringue is set and lightly colored.

  6. Serve fresh, but not hot.

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. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard, and whipped whites form the meringue topping.
Flour
Starch thickens the milk mixture so the lemon filling becomes set and spoonable.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps stabilize the meringue.
Lemon
Adds acidity and aroma to the filling.

The step that matters

Cook the custard for one minute after adding the yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but overheating can curdle them. Cooking briefly and stirring keeps the filling smooth while the starch sets it.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, milk, 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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