Name: Apricots for Tarts
Ingredients: small apricots; fine moist sugar; water; pie crusts or patty-pans; ornaments (optional)

Why it works: Apricot and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,630 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Apricots for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Thin the apricots before the stone hardens, ensuring the fruit is small.
Simmer the apricots with a little sugar and just enough water to moisten the sugar until they release juice.

Assemble the tarts

Fill small pie dishes or patty-pans with baked crusts.
Sweeten the fruit to taste and fill the crusts when cold.
Add ornaments on top and optionally warm in the oven for a minute or two.

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.

Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together3,630 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

Small apricots: Provide the fruit filling, whose juice is released by simmering.
Fine moist sugar: Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out its juice during simmering.

“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.