Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Prune Whip
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the prunes
Cook the prunes until soft.
Pass the prunes through a colander.
Make the whip and bake
Add the sugar and the beaten egg whites to the prunes.
Bake in a pudding dish set in a pan of boiling water for 20 minutes.
Serve
Serve cold with cream or custard made from the egg yolks.
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.
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Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 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 body, fruity flavour and sweetness of the whip.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness and helps keep the mixture soft and smooth.
- Eggs
- Whites whip into a foam that lifts and sets the dessert; yolks enrich the custard.
The step that matters
Adding the beaten egg whites. Beaten whites trap air in a foam that gives the whip its lightness. Stirring them in too hard deflates the foam, so the dessert bakes up dense instead of light.
“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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