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To Prepare Apples or Pears for Tartlets

A fruit pulp made from boiled apples or pears, sweetened with sugar and lemon, used as filling for tartlets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Prepare Apples or Pears for Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel, core, and quarter the apples or pears.

  2. Boil the fruit in water until tender.

  3. Drain most of the water and reduce the fruit to a pulp by squeezing or passing it through a sieve.

Make the filling

  1. Remove the yellow rind from a lemon and mix it with some loaf sugar.

  2. Combine the lemon sugar with the fruit pulp, adding more sugar and lemon juice to taste.

  3. Simmer the mixture in a well-tinned saucepan for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. Let it cool before using.

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

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples or pears
Provides the bulk of the filling and its fruity flavour once cooked to a pulp.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, once simmered, thickens the pulp into a spreadable filling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Reduce the fruit to a pulp and simmer it. Fruit must be fully tender and well drained so the pulp is not watery. Simmering in a well-tinned saucepan with frequent stirring evaporates excess liquid and keeps the sugar from scorching on the bottom.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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