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Dessert

Ripe Fruit Tarts

A baked tart filled with mixed ripe fruit and sugar, topped with tart pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and plum work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 255 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Ripe Fruit Tarts

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. Wash and prepare the fruit, placing it in a dish with the center higher.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar over the fruit and add a little water.

  3. Rub the edges of the dish with the egg yolk.

  4. Cover with tart paste, pressing the edges to seal.

  5. Trim the edges and make a hole in the sides below the rim.

Bake and finish

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until done.

  2. Ten minutes before finishing, remove and ice the tart, then return to the oven to dry.

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. Currant + plumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Currant + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,734 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  5. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Mixed ripe fruit
Provides the main filling, with its natural juices and flavor forming the tart's body.
Moist or loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juice as it cooks.
Egg yolk
Brushed on the dish edges, it helps the tart paste stick and seal, and adds browning.
Tart paste
Forms the crust that encloses the fruit and bakes into a firm, golden shell.

The step that matters

Pressing the paste edges to seal. If the edges are not pressed firmly against the dish rim with the egg yolk, the paste can shrink or pull away while baking, letting juices escape and leaving the crust soggy or unevenly cooked.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, egg. 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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