Name: Stewed Prunes
Ingredients: 2 cups prunes; 2 tablespoons sugar; 1 tablespoon lemon juice (optional); water

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

2 cups prunes
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice (optional)
water

Directions

Prepare

Wash the prunes carefully and soak them in cold water for 2 hours, unless they are soft and fresh.
Place the prunes in a porcelain kettle and cover them with boiling water.

Stew and sweeten

Boil the prunes until tender.
Add 2 tablespoons of sugar for every cup of prunes and boil for an additional 10 minutes.
Stir in lemon juice if desired.

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.

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: Provide the main body and flavor, softening into a tender, spoonable fruit.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the prunes.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sweet, rich flavor of the prunes.

“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.