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Princess Tartlets

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Pistachio and nuts match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 425 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Princess Tartlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sift the flour into a bowl and mix with salt and baking powder.

  2. Rub in the butter, then drop the egg into the center without beating.

  3. Add enough cold water to make a stiff paste and work until smooth.

  4. Roll out the pastry and cut into rounds about 1½ inches in diameter.

  5. Remove a piece from the center of each round and fill with jam.

  6. Whip the cream, then add sugar and essence.

  7. Pile the whipped cream on top of the jam.

  8. Optionally, color the cream with cochineal or sprinkle with candied fruits or minced pistachio nuts.

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. Pistachio + nutstop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together425 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Flour + pistachiotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together505 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Swap the pistachio

The recipe marks pistachio as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, cream, sugar, nuts):

  1. Almondfits about as well
  2. Pistachiothe original
  3. Brazil nutfits less well
  4. Chestnutfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, cream, sugar, nuts. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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