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Dessert

Prune Pie

A baked pie with a custard of prunes, cream, corn starch, eggs, sugar, and fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Prune Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Stew and mash the prunes through a colander to get 1 cup of pulp.

  2. Add the cream, corn starch mixed with cold milk, egg yolks, sugar, and fruit juice to the pulp.

  3. Line a pie plate with crust and fill it with the mixture.

Bake and top

  1. Bake in a hot oven at 400°F (200°C) until set, being careful not to burn.

  2. Beat the egg whites with powdered sugar and spread over the top of the pie.

  3. Brown lightly under the broiler.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Milk + apricottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together826 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Corn + apricottop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

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

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the filling as they set and enrich its texture.
Egg whites
Whipped with powdered sugar, they form a light meringue topping that browns.
Corn starch
Thickens the filling so it sets smoothly when baked.
Prunes
Provide the main fruit pulp, sweetness and flavor of the filling.
Thin sweet cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the filling a softer, creamier texture.

The step that matters

Baking until set without burning. Egg yolks and starch set the filling as it heats, but too much heat curdles the eggs and scorches the crust. Pull the pie once the filling is firm, since it keeps setting as it cools.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, corn, milk, egg, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, corn, milk, egg, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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