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Dessert

Prune Whip

A sweet, airy dessert made from cooked prunes, sugar, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Prune Whip

Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Prune Whip

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Wash and soak prunes overnight in enough water to cover them.

  2. In the morning, cook the prunes in the same water until tender.

  3. Remove the stones from the prunes.

  4. Add sugar and cook until the mixture is the consistency of marmalade.

  5. Pass the mixture through a sieve.

Make the whip and bake

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Fold in the prune mixture until well combined.

  3. Pile the mixture lightly on a dish and bake until lightly browned.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Provide the main flavour and body of the whip as a sweet, fruity purée.
Sugar
Sweetens the prune mixture and thickens it to a marmalade-like consistency.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they give the whip its light, airy structure.

The step that matters

Beat the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites need to be whipped to stiff peaks to trap air, which gives the whip its lightness. Under-whipped whites will collapse, and over-mixing after folding in the prunes deflates the foam.

“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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