Name: Prune Tarts
Ingredients: 1 lb prunes; 1 tablespoon cranberry juice; sugar to taste; short crust pastry

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 Tarts

Ingredients

1 lb prunes
1 tablespoon cranberry juice
sugar to taste
short crust pastry

Directions

Prepare the filling

Scald the prunes, remove the stones, and take out the kernels.
Combine the prunes and kernels with cranberry juice and sugar.
Simmer for 10 minutes, then let cool.

Assemble the tarts

Use the mixture to fill the short crust pastry to make tarts.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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: Provide the main fruit flavour and soft, sticky body for the filling.
Short crust pastry: Forms the crisp, buttery case 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.