Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Tartlets

Fruit tartlets filled with stewed apricots in apricot syrup, thickened with arrowroot, served in short crust pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Arrowroot and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 525 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fruit Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Bake and dry pastry cases.

Fill the tartlets

  1. Cut apricots into neat pieces and stew them in apricot syrup until soft.

  2. Place stewed fruit into pastry cases.

  3. Thicken the syrup with arrowroot, sweeten, flavor, and color it.

  4. Pour thickened syrup over fruit.

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. Arrowroot + flourtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together525 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Apricot + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together30 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Syrup + flourtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,540 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricot
Provides the main fruit flavor and soft, tender filling once stewed.
Arrowroot
Thickens the apricot syrup into a glossy, set glaze.
Apricot syrup
Cooks the fruit until soft and forms the base of the glaze.

The step that matters

Thicken the syrup with arrowroot. Arrowroot must be mixed smoothly and heated only until the syrup turns clear and thick. Overcooking or boiling for too long can thin the starch's grip, leaving the glaze runny.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, syrup, arrowroot, flour):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup, arrowroot, flour. 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

Arrowroot PuddingArrowroot Pudding46 recipesApricot Ice CreamApricot Ice Cream26 recipesOranges in SyrupOranges in Syrup9 recipesMixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipes