Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum-tart

A tart made with whole plums, raw sugar, and fine short-paste crust, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Plum and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,313 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Plum-tart

Oven, in the book's wordsA slack oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a slack oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Skin and stone the plums, keeping them whole.

  2. Layer the plums in a tart dish, sprinkling raw sugar over each layer.

Assemble the tart

  1. Mask the rim of the dish with a strip of fine short-paste.

  2. Cover the fruit with a flat of the same paste.

  3. Channel the edges of the paste.

  4. Moisten the surface of the paste and sift fine sugar over it.

Bake

  1. Bake the tart in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 45 minutes.

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. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black plums
Provide the main filling, releasing juice that moistens the tart as it bakes.
Raw sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice, helping it soften while baking.
Fine short-paste
Forms the rich, crisp crust that encloses and supports the fruit.

“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.

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes