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Dessert

Stewed Prunes

Stewed prunes simmered with lemon and sugar, served with sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Stewed Prunes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Wash the prunes and place them in a pot.

  2. Add enough water to cover the prunes and bring to a boil.

  3. Reduce heat and simmer until the prunes are tender.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix sugar and the juice of the lemon.

  2. Add the sugar mixture to the prunes and stir well.

  3. Serve 2 prunes with sauce per portion.

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 + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Form the main body of the dish and soften into tender fruit as they simmer.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved in the cooking liquid, forms a syrup that coats the fruit.
Lemon
Its juice adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sugar and prunes.

The step that matters

Simmer until tender. Gentle simmering softens the dried fruit's tough cell structure evenly. Boiling hard can break the prunes apart and make the sauce cloudy, so keep the heat low and check for tenderness.

“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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