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Dessert

Tart Shells

A pastry shell made from puff pastry, sugar, and egg, baked and filled with jelly, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tart Shells

Ingredients

Directions

Shape the shells

  1. Roll out the puff pastry thinly.

  2. Cut out circles with a glass or biscuit cutter.

  3. Cut out the center of two out of three circles with a smaller glass or cup.

  4. Lay the rings on the third circle.

Bake and fill

  1. Bake immediately.

  2. Alternatively, line patty pans with the pastry to form shells.

  3. For serving, fill the shells with jelly.

  4. Top with meringue made from 1 egg white and 2 tablespoons of sugar.

  5. Brown in the 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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Puff pastry
Its layers of butter puff apart in the oven, forming flaky, crisp shell walls.
Sugar
Sweetens the meringue topping and helps stabilize the whipped egg white.
Egg
The white whips into a foam that bakes into the meringue topping.

The step that matters

Bake immediately. Puff pastry relies on cold butter creating steam that lifts its layers. If the dough warms and softens before baking, the layers fuse and the shells rise less.

“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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