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Dessert

Butter Tarts

A sweet pastry filled with a buttery, sugared custard and currants or raisins.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,227 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Butter Tarts

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Cream the butter and sugar together until well combined.

  2. Add the beaten eggs, currants or raisins, and lemon juice or vanilla; mix well.

Bake

  1. Line patty tins with pastry, fill with the mixture, and bake in a moderate oven.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

  2. Butter + curranttop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,856 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Butter
Creamed with sugar to trap air and give the filling a rich, tender body.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, creamed with butter, helps give it a smooth texture.
Eggs
Bind the filling and set during baking to give the tarts a custard-like center.
Currants or seedless raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated fruit sweetness throughout the filling.
Lemon juice or vanilla
Adds acidity or aroma that balances the sweetness of the filling.

The step that matters

Baking the filled tarts in a moderate oven. Eggs must set without curdling or puffing, so the oven should be moderate rather than hot. Overbaking makes the filling dry and rubbery, while underbaking leaves it runny.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, lemon):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, lemon. 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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