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Dessert

Nice Tartlet Paste

A pastry dough made from flour, butter, sugar, almond paste, and egg yolks for lining tartlet pans.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nice Tartlet Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the flour, butter, sugar, almond paste, and yolks together until well combined.

  2. Knead the mixture until it forms a smooth dough.

Shape

  1. Roll out the dough to your desired thickness.

  2. Use the dough to line tartlet pans or cut into shapes as desired.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Provides the structure that holds the dough together when rolled and shaped.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender texture in the baked dough.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the baked dough a tender, delicate crumb.
Almond paste
Adds almond flavor and moisture, making the dough richer and more tender.
Yolks
Add richness, moisture, and binding that help the dough hold together.

The step that matters

Knead only until smooth. Overworking develops gluten in the flour, which can make the baked tartlet shells tough rather than tender. Stop kneading once the dough is smooth and cohesive.

“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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