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Dessert

Prune Pudding

A baked pudding made with soaked prunes, sugar, lemon juice, and egg whites, served with cream or custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Prune Pudding

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Prune Pudding

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 prunes

  1. Wash and soak the prunes overnight.

  2. Boil the prunes until soft, then remove the stones and chop the fruit.

Make and bake

  1. Mix the chopped prunes with the powdered sugar, lemon juice, and beaten egg whites.

  2. Pile the mixture into a buttered dish and bake at 400°F (200°C) for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream or boiled custard.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Beaten whites trap air, helping the pudding rise and set in the oven.
Prunes
Supply the main fruit flavour, sweetness and moisture to the pudding.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the chopped prune mixture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet prune flavour.

The step that matters

Keep the beaten egg whites airy when mixing. The air held in beaten egg whites is what lifts the mixture in the oven. Overmixing or deflating it before baking leaves a denser, flatter pudding.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, butter, cream. 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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