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Dessert

Lemon or Orange Tarts

A tart made with lemon or orange rind, juice, sugar, butter, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Lemon or Orange Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Remove the yellow rind from the lemons or oranges and simmer until the water is evaporated and the rind is almost a paste.

  2. Carefully remove any white pulp and seeds, keeping as much juice as possible.

  3. Combine the rind with double the weight of the whole fruit in loaf sugar and mix over heat until well blended into a paste.

  4. Add ½ ounce of fresh butter and mix again.

Assemble and finish

  1. Line tart tins with light puff pastry, fill with the lemon or orange paste, and cover with more pastry.

  2. Optionally, add grated ginger for extra flavor.

  3. Ice the pastry covers before serving.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Lemons or seville oranges
Provide the rind and juice that form the tart's bright, sharp filling.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the filling and, when cooked down with the rind, helps form a thick paste.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and a smoother texture to the cooked fruit paste.
Light puff pastry
Forms the flaky case and cover that enclose the fruit paste.

The step that matters

Simmer the rind until it is almost a paste. Cooking off the water concentrates the rind's flavor and softens it, so the filling sets thick rather than watery inside the pastry.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, butter):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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