Name: Stuffed Prunes and Dates
Ingredients: prunes; chopped nuts; raisins; apricots; dates

Why it works: Nuts and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Stuffed Prunes and Dates

Ingredients

Directions

Soak the prunes overnight.
Dry the prunes and stuff them with chopped nuts, raisins, or apricots.
Wash the dates, dry them, and stuff them the same way as the prunes.

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.

Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together490 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Apricot + datestop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together35 recipes

Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).
Raisin + datestop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together358 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Nuts + datestop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together178 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Raisin + apricottop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together102 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).