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Dessert

Dried Fruits and Vegetables

A dish of soaked and slowly cooked dried fruits, optionally sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dried Fruits and Vegetables

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick over the dried fruits and cover them with cold water.

  2. Soak for 30 minutes, then wash thoroughly and drain.

  3. Cover again with cold water and soak for 12 to 24 hours.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook slowly until tender.

  2. Add sugar if desired for sauce when nearly done, or use like fresh fruit for pies or shortcake.

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. Apricot + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

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

  2. Apple + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Apricot + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Peach + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Apricot + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried fruits
Provide the main flavour and, once softened by soaking and cooking, the tender texture of the dish.
Cold water
Rehydrates the dried fruit during soaking and then forms the cooking liquid that becomes the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the finished sauce and is optional, added only if desired.

The step that matters

Cook slowly until tender. Slow cooking lets the soaked fruit soften evenly through to the centre without breaking apart. Cooking too hard can split the skins and leave the fruit mushy on the outside and firm inside.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, peach, pear, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Applethe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, peach, pear, sugar. 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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