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Dessert

Fresh Fruit Tartlets

A small pastry shell filled with fresh fruit, sugar, and a drop of water, baked until done.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Fresh Fruit Tartlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a quick oven”. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Make the short pastry and line pans with it.

  2. Pick and wash the fruit, then fill each tart with as much fruit as possible.

Bake and cool

  1. Sprinkle sugar over the fruit and add a tiny drop of water.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven until done.

  3. Cool on a wire tray, being careful when removing from the pans as the fruit juice makes them soft.

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. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Short pastry
Forms the crisp case that holds the fruit while it bakes.
Fresh fruit
Provides the main filling, along with its juice that moistens the tart.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps its juices form a syrup.

The step that matters

Removing the tarts from the pans after cooling. Fruit juice softens the pastry as it cools, so the tarts can break or stick if lifted too early or handled roughly. Letting them cool on a wire tray helps the base firm up before removal.

“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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