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Dessert

Orange Tart

A tart filled with a paste of boiled Seville oranges, sugar, butter, and lemon essence, baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Line a shallow tart dish with puff pastry.

Make the filling

  1. Boil the oranges until tender, then pound them into a paste.

  2. Add sugar, butter, orange juice, and essence of lemon to the paste.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into the pastry and bake until the crust is done.

  2. Top with custard or cream before serving.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter, aromatic flavour and the pulp that forms the filling's body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the orange's bitterness.
Butter
Adds richness and a smoother, softer mouthfeel to the filling.
Puff pastry
Forms the crisp, flaky shell that holds the filling.

The step that matters

Pound the boiled oranges into a smooth paste. Boiling softens the peel and pith so they break down evenly. Lumps or unbroken pieces leave an uneven texture in the baked filling.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, lemon. 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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