Name: Currant-jelly Tartlets, or Custards
Ingredients: 4 tablespoons currant jelly; 12 tablespoons beaten egg; Pastry for tartlets

Why it works: Currant and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,734 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Currant-jelly Tartlets, or Custards

Ingredients

4 tablespoons currant jelly
12 tablespoons beaten egg
Pastry for tartlets

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.

Make the filling

Stir 4 tablespoons of currant jelly in a bowl.
Gradually add 12 tablespoons of beaten egg, mixing well.
If the jelly is rich and sweet, no additional sugar is needed.

Bake the tartlets

Roll out the pastry very thin and line tartlet pans.
Fill the lined pans with the custard mixture.
Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for about 10 minutes.

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.

Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,734 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant jelly: Provides sweetness and fruit flavour that sets the filling's character.
Beaten egg: Thickens the mixture as it bakes, giving the filling a set, custard-like texture.

“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.