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Dessert

Apple Tarts

A pastry dish filled with cooked apples, lemon, cinnamon, sugar, and cloves, baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Apple Tarts

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slack oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the apple filling

  1. Peel, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. Place apples in a saucepan with lemon peel, water, and cinnamon.

  3. Cover and cook over medium heat until apples dissolve.

  4. Sweeten with sifted sugar and add syrup of cloves.

  5. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and let it cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a tart pan with puff pastry, fill with apple mixture, and cover with more pastry.

  2. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 30 minutes.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Break down into a soft pulp that forms the tart's filling.
Puff pastry
Bakes into flaky, layered pastry that encloses the filling.
Sifted sugar
Sweetens the apple mixture and balances the tartness of the fruit.
Syrup of cloves
Adds a warm, spiced aroma to the apple filling.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a fine sieve and let it cool. Cooked apples must be pushed fully smooth and cooled before filling, so the pulp sets evenly and does not make the pastry soggy or wet during baking.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, cinnamon, sugar, syrup, clove):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, cinnamon, sugar, syrup, clove. 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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