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Dessert

Stewed Pruneaux De Tours, or Tours Dried Plums

A slow-cooked dish of dried plums simmered in water and wine, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and red wine work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 107 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Stewed Pruneaux De Tours, or Tours Dried Plums

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, combine dried plums, water, and light red wine (or water and port wine).

  2. Simmer for 1½ hours until the plums are tender.

  3. Add sugar and continue to cook for an additional 2 hours or more until the plums are soft.

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. Plum + red winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Red wine + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together864 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried plums
Soften into tender pieces and form the main body of the dish.
Light red wine
Adds depth of flavour and a mild acidity to the cooking liquid.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the cooking liquid thicken slightly into a syrup.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar. Sugar added early can toughen the plum skins and slow softening. Adding it after the plums are tender lets them soften fully during the longer cook.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (red wine, sugar):

  1. Pearfits about as well
  2. Plumthe original
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against red wine, 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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