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Dessert

Dried Fruits

Chocolate-coated prunes baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Dried Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grate some chocolate and mix it with powdered sugar and beaten egg whites.

  2. Dip each prune in the mixture one by one.

  3. Place the prunes on a buttered tin without allowing them to touch.

  4. Bake for 15 minutes and 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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. 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

Egg whites
Whip up to form the coating that puffs, sets and turns crisp when baked.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the coating and helps it set into a smooth, thin layer.
Prunes
Provide the soft, moist, sweet fruit centre that the coating surrounds.

The step that matters

Place the prunes apart on the tin. As the egg white coating sets in the oven, touching prunes can fuse together or steam each other instead of drying and browning, leaving soft, unevenly cooked spots.

“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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