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Dessert

Apple Tartlets

Apple Tartlets are small pastry cups filled with stewed apples, lemon syrup, and apricot marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 777 recipes. Both carry gamma-undecalactone, which smells peach, sweet. The science ↓

Apple Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Butter the tartlet pans and line them with tart paste, trimming the edges.

  2. Peel and halve the apples, removing the cores, and place them in a bowl with lemon juice.

Stew the apples

  1. Add the sugar and lemon peel to the apples, then stew gently until tender.

  2. Let the apples cool in their syrup.

Assemble and serve

  1. Place half an apple in each tartlet, fill with syrup, and add a little apricot marmalade.

  2. Turn out the tartlets and serve.

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. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  2. Lemon + apricottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,098 recipes

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

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Apple + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Apricot + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,458 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooking apples
Provide the main filling, softening into a tender, flavourful base when stewed.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the apples and, with the stewing syrup, helps form the filling's syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the apple flavour and helps keep the fruit's colour lighter.
Apricot marmalade
Adds sweetness and a glossy finish to the tartlet.
Tart paste
Forms the crisp pastry case that holds the apple filling.

The step that matters

Stew the apples gently until tender. Gentle heat softens the apples evenly without breaking them down into mush, and the syrup thickens as sugar dissolves and concentrates. Boiling hard can ruin the texture of the fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, apricot, 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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