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Dessert

Plum Short-cake with Nuts

A pastry made of a rich pie crust topped with sliced plums and nuts, served with cream or rich milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Plum Short-cake with Nuts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a rich pie crust and roll it out thin.

  2. Bake the crust until golden and cut into desired shapes.

Prepare the plums

  1. Peel, seed, and finely chop the plums.

  2. Sweeten the plums to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread a thin layer of plums over each piece of pastry.

  2. Sprinkle each layer liberally with minced nuts.

  3. Build the layers as high as desired.

  4. Ice the top and decorate with nut kernels.

  5. Serve with cream or very rich milk.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Nuts + creamtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together886 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Plum + nutstop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl decanoate (grape, waxy).

  5. Sugar + nutstop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,228 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rich pie crust
Forms the crisp, layered pastry that holds the fruit and nuts.
Very ripe plums
Provide the main fruit filling and moisture between the pastry layers.
Sugar
Sweetens the plums to balance their tartness.
Minced nuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor between the layers.
Cream or very rich milk
Adds richness and moisture to contrast with the crisp pastry.

The step that matters

Bake the crust until golden. The pastry must be baked fully so it stays crisp and firm under the moist plum layers; underbaked crust softens and turns soggy as the fruit releases juice.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, nuts, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, nuts, cream. 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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