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Dessert

Currant Pie or Tart

A pastry tart filled with stewed currants sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Currant Pie or Tart

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Stew the currants for a few minutes.

  2. Strain them through a sieve and mix in the sugar while hot.

  3. Set the mixture aside to cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line small plates with puff pastry.

  2. Fill the pastry with the currant mixture.

  3. Bake until the crust is golden brown.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Currants
Provide the main tart flavour and natural pectin that helps the filling thicken as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the currants' sharp acidity and helps thicken the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a crisp, flaky shell that browns in the oven as its butter layers puff.

The step that matters

Let the filling cool before adding it to the pastry. Puff pastry rises because its layers of cold butter turn to steam in the oven. Hot filling melts that butter, so the layers can collapse and the base can turn soggy.

“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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