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Dessert

Prune Tarts

A tart filled with simmered prunes, cranberry juice, and sugar, baked in puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Prune Tarts

Why it works: Cranberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Prune Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Scald the prunes.

  2. Remove the stones from the prunes.

  3. Break the prunes apart.

  4. Combine the prunes, juice, and sugar in a saucepan.

  5. Simmer the mixture until thickened.

  6. Let the mixture cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Fill puff pastry with the cooled mixture to make tarts.

  2. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) 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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cranberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together374 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

Prunes
Provide the main fruit body and deep, sweet flavour of the filling.
Cranberry or currant juice
Adds moisture and a tart fruitiness that softens the filling's sweetness.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it cooks, thickens the juices into a spreadable filling.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, layered crust that puffs and browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before filling the pastry. A hot filling melts the butter layers in puff pastry before they can set, so the tarts turn greasy and fail to puff evenly.

“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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