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Dessert

Orange Tartlets

A tartlet filled with a sweet orange custard and garnished with glace cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the orange filling

  1. In a pan, combine cold water, sugar, grated orange rind, and lemon juice, and stir until the sugar dissolves.

  2. Add the yolks of the eggs and stir until the mixture just comes to a boil.

  3. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and gently fold them into the orange mixture.

Bake the shells and fill

  1. Line deep tartlet tins with rich short pastry and place a square of bread crust in each to keep them hollow.

  2. Bake the tartlet shells until golden, then remove the bread crust.

  3. Fill the cooled tartlet shells with the orange mixture and garnish with pieces of glace cherries.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Orange + breadtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the orange mixture into a set, custard-like filling as they heat.
Egg whites
Whisked to stiffness, they add lightness and airy volume to the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the citrus.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the orange flavour.
Orange rind
Contributes the main citrus aroma and flavour to the filling.

The step that matters

Heating the yolks. Stir the yolks in gently and stop once the mixture just boils. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but overheating can curdle or scramble them, leaving a grainy filling.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, egg, bread):

  1. Vanillafits about as well
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Raspberryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, egg, bread. 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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