Skip to main content
Dessert

Prune Pie

A fruit pie made with soaked prunes, sugar, lemon juice, and a double crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Prune Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes overnight after washing them thoroughly.

  2. In the morning, stew the prunes gently in the soaking water.

  3. When done and still hot, remove the stones from the prunes.

Assemble and bake

  1. Add the juice of one lemon and mix in the sugar.

  2. Pour the mixture into a deep pie plate and cover with the upper crust.

  3. Bake until the crust is golden brown.

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
Provide the main fruit body and sweet, dense filling once stewed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the sweet prunes.
Pie crust
Encloses the filling and browns in the oven to form the top and base.

The step that matters

Remove the stones while the prunes are still hot. Warm prunes are soft and pit easily, while cooled fruit firms up and tears. Stones left in can crack teeth, so check each prune carefully.

“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 CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes