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Dessert

Orange Tartlets

A pastry shell filled with rice, topped with orange halves and syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,067 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Orange Tartlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very slow oven”. The 350°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel and quarter the oranges, removing the core.

  2. Boil them for 3 minutes in a small amount of sugar and water.

  3. Drain on a sieve.

  4. Boil the juice and cooking liquid until it reduces to a syrup.

Make the tart shells

  1. Prepare pastry shells in patty pans and bake them.

  2. Infuse the orange rinds in the syrup without boiling.

  3. Butter the patty pans.

  4. Line with puff paste.

Bake the tarts

  1. Fill with uncooked rice.

  2. Bake in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C).

  3. Trim the white pith from the oranges, core them, and cut in halves.

Assemble and serve

  1. Strain the syrup over the halves.

  2. Heat in the oven for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the rice from the tarts.

  4. Place half an orange in each tart.

  5. Pour syrup over them.

  6. Serve the tarts on a lace-edged dish or napkin.

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 + ricetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Sugar + ricetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Sweet oranges
Provide the fruit, with rind for aroma and juice for the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the syrup and thickens it as the liquid reduces.
Puff paste
Bakes into flaky, crisp layers that hold the orange filling.
Uncooked rice
Weighs down the pastry so it keeps its shape while baking.

The step that matters

Infusing the rinds without boiling. Boiling the rinds in the syrup can make them bitter and tough, while gentle infusion lets them flavour the syrup with aroma alone.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rice. 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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