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Dessert

Vienna Tart

A puff pastry tart filled with custard, peaches, green gages, cherries, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and peach work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Vienna Tart

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pastry

  1. Roll out the puff pastry and line a pie dish with it.

  2. Bake the pastry until golden.

Fill and decorate

  1. Fill the baked pastry with rich custard flavored with lemon or vanilla.

  2. Once the custard is firm, arrange the halved peaches around the edge.

  3. Place the halved green gages inside the peaches, and fill the center with cherries.

Serve

  1. Serve cold in the same dish, topped with whipped cream.

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. Lemon + peachtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together721 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Lemon + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,640 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Lemon and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,640 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

Puff pastry
Bakes into a crisp, golden, flaky shell that holds the filling.
Rich custard
Forms a set, creamy base that the fruit rests on.
Peaches
Add sweetness and juiciness that contrast with the rich custard.
Green gages
Contribute sweet-tart fruit flavor and color to the filling.
Cherries
Add sweetness and a juicy fruit note to the center of the tart.
Whipped cream
Adds a light, cool, fat-rich topping that softens each bite.

The step that matters

Let the custard firm before adding the peaches. Arranging fruit on custard that is still liquid lets the fruit sink and the surface smear. Custard sets as it cools because egg proteins coagulate, so the fruit should go on only once it is firm.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, cream):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, cream. 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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