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Dessert

Prune Whip

A dessert of soaked prunes blended with stiff egg white, served with thick or whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Prune Whip

Why it works: Egg and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 42,166 recipes. Both carry acetic acid, which smells sour, vinegar. The science ↓

Prune Whip

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes in water until very soft.

  2. Remove the prunes from the water and take out the pits.

  3. Mash the prunes through a colander.

Make the whip

  1. Beat the egg white until very stiff.

  2. Whip the beaten egg white into the prune pulp.

Serve

  1. Serve with thick cream or whipped cream.

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. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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, sweetness and flavour once softened and mashed into a pulp.
Egg white
Whipped to stiffness, it traps air and gives the dessert its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Beating the egg white until very stiff. Egg white proteins unfold and trap air when beaten; under-beaten whites collapse, leaving the whip dense instead of light and airy.

“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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