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Dessert

Barberry Tartlets

Barberry tartlets are small pastry shells filled with barberries cooked with sugar and served after baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and rice are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,744 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Barberry Tartlets

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slow oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the stalks from the barberries.

  2. Place the barberries and sugar in a jar.

  3. Put the jar in a saucepan of boiling water or a slow oven and cook until tender.

Bake the shells

  1. Line 1 large or 2 medium-sized tart tins with the short crust paste.

  2. Fill the tins with rice or crusts of bread placed in buttered papers.

  3. Bake in a brisk oven (400°F / 200°C) until crisp.

Fill and serve

  1. Once cooled, fill the tart shells with the prepared fruit and syrup.

  2. Serve.

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. Sugar + ricetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,744 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Barberries
Provide the tart, sharp fruit flavour that the sugar balances, and the bulk of the filling.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the barberries and helps draw out juice to form a syrup as they cook.
Short crust paste
Forms the crisp, sturdy case that holds the fruit filling.

The step that matters

Cooking the barberries until tender. Cooking gently in a water bath or slow oven softens the fruit and draws out juice slowly. Overheating can scorch the sugar or break the fruit down unevenly before filling.

“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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