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Pickled Prunes

A preserved prune dish made by boiling prunes with vinegar, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and optional ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Pickled Prunes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Wash the prunes in two waters and soak in clean water for 12 hours.

  2. Drain all but ½ cup of water and place the prunes in a crock.

  3. Cover the crock and set it in a pot of cold water.

  4. Bring the water to a boil slowly and keep it boiling until the prunes are hot and soft, but not broken.

Make the syrup and pickle

  1. In a separate pot, combine the vinegar, sugar, cloves, and cinnamon; bring to a boil.

  2. Once boiling, add the prunes and cook gently for 5 minutes.

  3. Seal the prunes in hot jars and let them sit for about a month before eating.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Vinegar + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 fruit body, which softens during gentle heating and soaking.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the pickled fruit.
Sugar
Balances the sharp vinegar and gives the syrup its sweetness.
Whole cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickling liquid.
Cinnamon stick
Adds warm aromatic sweetness to the pickling syrup.

The step that matters

Keep the prunes hot and soft but not broken. Heating slowly in a water bath softens the fruit evenly. Boiling too hard or too long can split the skins and make the prunes fall apart in the syrup.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, cinnamon. 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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