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Dessert

Fruit-Tarts of Preserved Fruits

A puff pastry tart filled with preserved fruit jam and flavored with lemon, cinnamon, and candied orange peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit-Tarts of Preserved Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA sharp oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. If using apples, peel, core, and quarter them.

  2. Stew and mash the apples, then sweeten with fine‑beat sugar.

  3. Add lemon juice and zest, ground cinnamon, candied orange peel, and a little white wine or cider.

Assemble and bake

  1. Cover a flat dish with puff pastry and create a broad rim around the edges.

  2. Bake the pastry until golden, then fill with the prepared jam.

  3. Optionally, decorate the top with pastry stars or flowers baked on tins.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Marmalades, jams, and preserved small fruits
Provide the main fruit flavour and sweetness, and set the filling's body as it bakes.
Puff pastry
Forms the crisp, flaky base and rim that holds the filling.
Candied orange-peel
Adds concentrated citrus aroma and a chewy, bittersweet bite.
Lemon juice and zest
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and aromatic citrus oils.

The step that matters

Bake the pastry until golden, then fill. The pastry must be fully baked before the filling goes in, so the base stays crisp instead of turning soggy under the moist fruit.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, cinnamon, orange, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, cinnamon, orange, white wine. 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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