Skip to main content
Dessert

Cheese Tarts

Cheese tarts made with cottage cheese, eggs, currants, butter, almonds, sugar, and lemon flavor, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cottage cheese and butter work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Cheese 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. The book gives no cooking times either; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

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

Make the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix the cottage cheese, eggs, currants, butter, chopped almonds, sugar, and lemon flavor until well combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into tart shells.

Bake

  1. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until set and 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. Cottage cheese + buttertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  2. Almond + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Cottage cheese + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together601 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the filling and set it into a firm, sliceable custard when baked.
Cottage cheese
Forms the creamy body of the filling and contributes moisture and tang.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the filling a softer, more tender texture.
Almonds
Add crunch and a nutty flavor that contrasts with the soft filling.

The step that matters

Baking until just set. Eggs keep setting as the tart cools, so pulling it too late can leave the filling rubbery and dry, while pulling it too early leaves it runny in the centre. Look for a set edge with a slight wobble in the middle.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cottage cheese, egg, butter, almond, sugar, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cottage cheese, egg, butter, almond, sugar, lemon. 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

Lemon PieLemon Pie37 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes