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Dessert

Lent Tarts or Egg Cheesecakes

A sweet tart made with butter, sugar, currants, eggs, nutmeg, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lent Tarts or Egg Cheesecakes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the hard-boiled eggs very fine.

Make the filling

  1. Warm the butter and mix it with sugar, currants, chopped eggs, nutmeg, and lemon peel.

  2. Pour the mixture into small tart tins.

Bake

  1. Bake until set.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

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

  2. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Currant + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,983 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and moisture, and carries the sugar and flavours through the filling.
Hard-boiled eggs
Provide body and structure, and set firm as the filling bakes.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps it brown lightly in the oven.
Currants
Add chewy texture and pockets of sweetness throughout the filling.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Baking is what turns the loose, buttery mixture into a firm filling. Underbaking leaves it runny, while overbaking can make the egg dry and rubbery.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, nutmeg, lemon. 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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