Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Prunes

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Wash the prunes and soak them overnight in the water.

  2. Cook the prunes slowly in the soaking water until tender.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice, then cook for an additional 5 minutes.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked 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
Provide the fruit, which softens during slow cooking to become tender and juicy.
Sugar
Sweetens the cooking liquid and balances the fruit's natural tartness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet, rich flavour of the prunes.

The step that matters

Cook the prunes slowly in the soaking water until tender.. Gentle, slow simmering softens the fruit's flesh evenly while keeping the skins intact. Fast boiling can split the skins and leave the prunes ragged and unevenly textured.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes