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Prune Toast

A toast of bread topped with boiled prunes, butter, sherry, and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Prune Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove pits from prunes after boiling them until soft.

  2. Cut the crust from a thick slice of bread.

Cook and serve

  1. In a chafing dish, heat the butter until very hot.

  2. Brown the bread on both sides in the hot butter.

  3. Pour the prunes over the browned bread.

  4. Sweeten to taste and add the sherry.

  5. Serve with cream.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Bread + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together682 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Sherry + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Prunes
Softened by boiling, they provide the main fruit flavor and moist, sweet topping.
Butter
Browns the bread through milk solids and adds rich, nutty fat flavor.
Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the prune mixture while its browned surface adds contrast.
Sherry
Adds aroma and a slight acidity that balances the sweetness of the prunes.

The step that matters

Browning the bread in very hot butter. If the butter is not hot enough, the bread steams and absorbs grease instead of forming a crisp, browned crust. Browning also builds flavor through the Maillard reaction, so the bread holds up under the moist prunes.

“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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