Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Prunes

Stewed prunes are prunes simmered with sugar and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the prunes very carefully.

  2. Soak the prunes in cold water for 2 hours, unless they seem soft and fresh.

Stew and serve

  1. Place the prunes in a porcelain kettle and cover with boiling water.

  2. Boil until tender, then add 2 tablespoons of sugar for every cup of prunes.

  3. Boil for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Add 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.

  1. 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
Main fruit that softens during stewing and gives the dish its body and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tart, concentrated flavour of the cooked prunes.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet stewed fruit.

The step that matters

Boil until tender before adding sugar. Sugar added while prunes are still firm can toughen the skins and slow softening, so the fruit should be tender first. Boiling then continues briefly so the sugar dissolves and the syrup can develop.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes