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Dessert

For Tartlets

A dough for tartlet shells made with flour, butter, sugar, almond paste, egg yolks, and rose or orange‑flower water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and almond are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,673 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

For Tartlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dough

  1. Mix the flour, butter, sugar, almond paste, and egg yolks together.

  2. Add rose or orange-flower water and beat until very smooth.

Shape the shells

  1. Cover small tart pans with the mixture.

  2. Cut out flat or raised covers for the tartlets.

  3. If using raised covers, bake them on tart pans turned up.

  4. Do not fill the tartlets until ready to bake.

Fill

  1. Fill with various fillings like frangipane or fried creams.

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. Flour + almondtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,673 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Almond + rosetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,465 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Fine flour
Forms the main structure of the dough so the shells hold their shape.
Butter
Adds fat for a tender, crumbly texture in the baked shell.
Egg yolks
Add richness and bind the dough into a smooth, cohesive mixture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the shell brown during baking.
Almond paste
Adds moisture and a nutty sweetness that deepens the shell's flavour.

The step that matters

Beat until very smooth. Thorough beating fully blends the fat, sugar and yolks so the dough rolls and bakes evenly without streaks or lumps.

“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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