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Dessert

Prune Pie

A fruit pie made with prunes, sugar, boiling water, butter, and pie crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Prune Pie

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.

Prepare the filling

  1. Wash prunes thoroughly in several waters.

  2. Combine prunes and sugar in a 2:1 ratio in a preserving kettle.

  3. Pour boiling water over mixture and boil for at least two hours until syrup thickens.

  4. Remove from heat and pour mixture into pie plates lined with pie crust.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add butter and cover with a rich pie crust.

  2. Bake in preheated oven at 350°F until golden.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Provide the main fruit body and natural pectin that thickens the filling as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and, through long boiling, helps thicken the syrup.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the flavor and mouthfeel of the filling.

The step that matters

Boiling the prune and sugar mixture. Boiling long enough lets the syrup reduce and thicken, so the filling sets rather than running out when the pie is cut. Stopping too early leaves a thin, watery filling.

“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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