Why it works: Currant and apricot work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 188 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓
Fruit Tarts
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the pastry for the tarts and bake it until golden.
Select your fruit: currants, gooseberries, raspberries, cherries, or apricots.
If using apricots, you can use them when they are half grown or ripe.
If desired, prepare the fruit into a jam, but avoid adding too much sugar.
Fill the baked pastry with the prepared fruit or jam.
Serve the tarts warm or at room temperature.
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.
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Currant + apricottop 15% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together188 recipes
Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).
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Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,630 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
Swap the currant
How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar):
- Vanillafits better
- Peachfits better
- Plumfits better
- Currantthe original
Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.
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