Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Prunes

Stewed prunes are cooked with sugar and optional lemon until tender, then cooled and served.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 and soak them in fresh, clean water for several hours.

Cook

  1. Cook the prunes in the soaking water until nearly tender.

  2. Add the sugar and cook again until the prunes have absorbed the sugar and are entirely tender.

Cool and serve

  1. Cool the prunes.

  2. Serve the prunes.

  3. Optionally, cook a slice of lemon with them.

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
Soften during simmering, becoming tender and giving the dish its body and main flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and is absorbed into the fruit as it simmers.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar after the prunes are nearly tender. Sugar can slow the softening of fruit, so the prunes are cooked until nearly tender first. The sugar then goes in and cooking continues until they are fully tender.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes