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Dessert

Rich Paste for Tarts and Cheese Cakes

A thick paste made from sugar, butter, eggs, lemon peel, spices, and flour, used for tarts and cheese cakes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Rich Paste for Tarts and Cheese Cakes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Pound and sift the sugar.

  2. Gradually add the sugar to the butter and beat until creamy.

  3. Beat the eggs until very light and add them to the mixture.

  4. Stir in the grated lemon peel and a pinch of cinnamon or nutmeg.

  5. Add enough dried and sifted flour to form a paste, but do not make it too stiff.

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

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

  2. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar, it gives the paste richness and a tender texture.
Sugar
Beaten into the butter, it sweetens the paste and helps create a light, creamy base.
Eggs
Beaten in, they add moisture and structure that help bind the paste.
Flour
Added last, it gives the paste body so it holds its shape.

The step that matters

Add the flour gently and stop when it forms a paste. Too much flour or overworking makes the paste stiff and dense, so it becomes tough rather than tender once baked.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, cinnamon, flour. 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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