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Dessert

Stewed Prunes

Stewed prunes are cooked with sugar, lemon, and water until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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

  1. Soak hard prunes in warm water for 2 hours.

Stew and serve

  1. In a pan, combine 1 lb sugar, ½ cup water, the juice of the lemon, and the rind of half a lemon thinly pared. Bring to a boil.

  2. Drain the soaked prunes and add them to the pan. Cover and stew gently for at least 1 hour, longer if they are very hard.

  3. Remove the pieces of lemon peel before serving.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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
Provide the main body and sweet, concentrated fruit flavour as they soften in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the fruit take on a glossy, thick body.
Lemon
Adds acidity and bright aroma that balance the sweetness of the prunes and sugar.

The step that matters

Stew gently with the lid on. A rolling boil would toughen and break the skins, while gentle heat softens the dried fruit evenly. Hard prunes need the full time, so checking for tenderness matters before serving.

“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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