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Dessert

Tart Shells

A pastry shell filled with raisins and lemon zest, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tart Shells

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the pastry

  1. Mix butter, lard, cream of tartar, baking soda, salt, sugar, and egg white in a bowl until combined.

  2. Add cold water gradually until the mixture resembles a pie crust.

Make the filling

  1. Grate the zest of the lemon and finely chop the rest of the lemon.

  2. Combine raisins, chopped lemon, and powdered sugar in a separate bowl.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll out the pastry and cut into rounds.

  2. Fill each round half full with the filling, fold over, and pinch the edges to seal.

  3. Place on a baking sheet and bake at 350°F (175°C) 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.

  1. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Raisin + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the pastry turn flaky and tender as it bakes.
Lard
Provides fat that keeps the pastry short and tender by coating flour particles.
Cream of tartar
Adds acidity that helps keep the pastry tender and balances the baking soda.
Baking soda
Reacts with the acid in the cream of tartar to lift and lighten the pastry.
Raisins
Provide sweetness and chewy body to the filling.

The step that matters

Pinch the edges to seal. A tight seal keeps the juicy raisin filling inside the shell while baking, so it does not leak and burn on the sheet.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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