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Dessert

Ripe Fruit Tarts

A tart filled with a mixture of ripe gooseberries, damsons, cherries, currants, raspberries, plums, and other fruits, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 the fruit

  1. Wash and prepare the fresh fruit, mixing them together.

  2. Place the fruit in a dish with the center higher than the edges.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar over the fruit, adjusting the amount based on ripeness.

  4. Add a little water to the mixture.

Assemble and bake

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

  2. Cover the fruit with tart paste, pressing it down around the rim.

  3. Trim the edges with a knife and make a small hole in the sides below the rim.

  4. Bake in a moderate oven at 350°F (175°C).

  5. Ten minutes before it’s done, remove it, ice the top, and return it 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

Tart paste
Forms the crust that encloses the fruit and holds in its juices while baking.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice, adjusting to how ripe the fruit is.
Egg yolk
Brushed on the rim to help the paste seal and brown during baking.

The step that matters

Covering the fruit with tart paste. The paste must be pressed firmly around the rim so it seals the dish; a loose seal lets juice escape and the crust can dry out or fall apart.

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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