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Dessert

Dried Fruit

A simple stewed dried fruit dish sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Dried Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the dried fruit well in warm water.

  2. Soak the fruit in cold water until plump, preferably overnight.

Cook and serve

  1. Cook the soaked fruit in the soaking water until tender.

  2. Sweeten to taste and simmer for five minutes.

  3. Serve hot or cold.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

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

  2. Plum + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Plum + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dried fruit
Provides the main flavour and, once soaked and cooked, the soft, tender texture of the dish.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, balancing the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Soak the fruit until plump. Dried fruit is dense and shrunken. Soaking rehydrates it so it cooks evenly and becomes tender, rather than staying tough or splitting unevenly in the pan.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, peach, apricot, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, peach, apricot, 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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