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
Wash the prunes and steep them in the pint of cold water for two hours.
Pour the water into a saucepan and add the sugar and lemon rind.
Stew
Boil uncovered for ten minutes, then add the prunes.
Cover with a lid and stew slowly for about one and a half hours, until the prunes are soft.
Serve
Pour everything onto a dish and serve cold, preferably with milk puddings.
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.
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Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- The main fruit; slow stewing softens its flesh and lets it absorb the syrup.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like flavour to the syrup.
The step that matters
Stew slowly under a lid. Keeping the heat gentle and the pan covered lets the prunes soften evenly and keeps their skins from splitting. Hard boiling toughens the skins and breaks the fruit apart.
“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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