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Prune Toast

A sweet toast topped with a thickened prune mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Prune Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the prune mixture

  1. Wash the prunes and cook them slowly until tender.

  2. Rub the cooked prunes through a colander.

  3. If the mixture is too thin, thicken it with a little corn starch or flour.

  4. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and ½ teaspoon of vanilla to each pint of prunes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Dip slices of zwieback into hot water and remove them immediately.

  2. Place the zwieback in a serving dish and top each slice with 2 or 3 tablespoons of the prune mixture.

  3. Serve hot.

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 + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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
Cooking softens them, and rubbing them through a colander gives the mixture its smooth, thick body.
Corn starch or flour (in the method)
Starch thickens the prune mixture if it is too thin after cooking.
Zwieback
Dry, crisp slices act as the base that the warm prune mixture is spooned over.

The step that matters

Dipping the zwieback. Dipping only briefly and removing the slices immediately keeps them from becoming soggy, so they still hold the topping.

“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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