Name: Raisin Tarts
Ingredients: 2 pie crusts; 1 cup chopped raisins; ½ cup sugar

Why it works: Raisin and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,481 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Raisin Tarts

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

2 pie crusts
1 cup chopped raisins
½ cup sugar

Directions

Prepare

Cut out pie crusts with a scalloped cutter.
Use two crusts for each tart.

Make and bake

Mix chopped raisins and sugar for the filling.
Fill the tart shells with the mixture.
Bake until golden brown.

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.

Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,481 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Pie crusts: Form the edible shell that holds the filling and bakes crisp around it.
Raisins: Provide chewy texture and concentrated sweetness in the filling.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and helps it caramelise and brown during baking.

“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.