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Dessert

Prune Toast

A toast made with prunes, sugar, lemon, and butter, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Bread and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Prune Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the prunes

  1. Soak the prunes overnight in water to cover.

  2. Cook the prunes until very tender, then remove the stones.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the prunes with sugar, lemon juice, and hot water if needed. Cook until the sugar is melted.

Fry the bread and serve

  1. Cut the stale bread into thick rounds and fry in hot butter until golden brown on both sides.

  2. Place the cooked prunes on the fried bread and top with a spoonful of whipped cream.

  3. Serve immediately.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  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

Prunes
Provide the main fruit flavour and a soft, moist, sweet filling for the toast.
Sugar
Sweetens the prunes and helps form a syrupy coating as it dissolves in the cooking liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the prunes.
Stale bread
Forms the crisp, absorbent base that holds the prunes.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browns the bread surface through frying.
Whipped cream
Adds cool, creamy richness that contrasts with the warm prunes.

The step that matters

Fry the bread until golden brown on both sides. Frying in hot butter browns the bread through the Maillard reaction, creating flavour and a crisp surface. Bread fried too gently stays pale and soggy, so it cannot hold the prunes well.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, bread, 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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