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Dessert

Stewed Prunes

Stewed prunes are prunes simmered in water with sugar and optional lemon juice until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 carefully.

  2. If the prunes are hard and dry, soak them in cold water for 1 hour.

Stew

  1. Place the prunes in a porcelain-lined or granite-ware kettle and cover with boiling water.

  2. Cover the kettle closely and boil slowly until the prunes are swollen and tender.

  3. Add ½ cup of sugar for every pint of prunes and boil for a few more minutes, being careful not to break the skins.

  4. If the prunes lack flavor, add a little lemon juice.

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 body, soft texture and fruity flavor of the stewed dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the cooked fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor when the prunes taste flat.

The step that matters

Boil slowly with the kettle covered. Slow, covered simmering softens the dried fruit evenly and keeps it swollen and whole. A hard, fast boil can split the skins and break the prunes apart.

“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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