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Dessert

A French Plum Pie

A pie made with dried French plums, port wine, sugar, and puff pastry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

A French Plum Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Stew the plums in enough water to cover until tender.

  2. Add the port wine and cook for a few more minutes.

  3. Once the plums are tender, stir in the sugar.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the plums and liquid into a pie dish.

  2. Cover with puff pastry and bake until golden.

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 + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 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. Port wine + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 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

Dried french plums
Provide the main fruit flavour and soft, jammy filling as they soften in liquid.
Port wine
Adds depth and a fruity aroma to the plums while they cook.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the dried plums.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden crust that browns in the oven.

The step that matters

Stewing the plums until fully tender. Dried plums stay firm and tough if not cooked long enough. Sugar added too early can also slow softening, so it is stirred in only after the fruit is tender.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port 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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