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Dessert

French Plum Tart

A tart filled with stewed French plums, sugar, and water or port wine, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

French Plum Tart

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.

Make the plum filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine plums, sugar, and water or port wine.

  2. Stew gently until you can remove the stones.

  3. Extract the kernels and return half to the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Transfer the mixture to a tart dish and cover with pastry.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes and serve hot.

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. Plum + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Port wine + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,499 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Plum + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together710 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the main fruit body and tart flavor that the filling is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps draw juices out of the plums as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounder, softer mouthfeel to the filling.
Pastry
Encloses the filling and bakes into the crisp, browned crust of the tart.

The step that matters

Stew gently until you can remove the stones. Gentle heat softens the fruit so the stones release cleanly without the plums breaking down into a mush. Too much heat scorches the sugar and toughens the fruit.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, port wine, butter):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, port wine, butter. 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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