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Dessert

Prune Pie

A fruit pie made with prunes, sugar, lemon juice, and prune cooking liquid, topped with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Prune Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Wash the prunes and soak them in cold water.

  2. Cook the prunes in the same water until soft.

  3. Remove the stones and cut the prunes into quarters.

Make the filling

  1. Mix the prunes with sugar and lemon juice.

  2. Boil the cooking liquid down to 2 tablespoons.

Assemble and bake

  1. Line a pie pan with the crust.

  2. Fill the crust with the prunes, then pour the reduced liquid over them.

  3. Dot with butter and sprinkle with flour.

  4. Cover with an upper crust and bake.

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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Lemon + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 bulk of the filling and provide the main sweet, fruity flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the prunes and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet prunes.
Flour
Thickens the juices so the filling sets rather than running out of the pie.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that softens the filling's flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the cooking liquid down to 2 tablespoons.. Reducing the liquid concentrates its flavour and removes excess water, so the pie filling is thick rather than runny after baking.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, flour):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, flour. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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