Name: Prune Tart
Ingredients: 2 cups prunes; ½ cup cranberry juice; ½ cup sugar; 1 light puff pastry crust

Why it works: Cranberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Prune Tart

Ingredients

2 cups prunes
½ cup cranberry juice
½ cup sugar
1 light puff pastry crust

Directions

Prepare the filling

Scald the prunes, remove the stones, and break them apart.
Combine the prunes, cranberry juice, and sugar in a saucepan and simmer.
Allow the mixture to cool.

Assemble the tart

Make a tart using the sweetened prunes as the filling in the puff pastry crust.

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.

Cranberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together374 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes: Form the main filling and provide the tart's dense, sweet fruit flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the prunes and helps them thicken into a spreadable filling as they simmer.
Puff pastry crust: Forms the flaky, buttery shell that holds the filling.

“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.