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Drink

Dry Plum Beevrage

A chilled beverage made from boiled dry plums, brown sugar, and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Dry Plum Beevrage

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Simmer the plums

  1. Boil 1 quart of water in a saucepan.

  2. Add 12 fresh dry French plums and boil for 20 minutes.

  3. Pour the plums and liquid into a basin to cool.

Finish and serve

  1. Once cold, remove the plums and place them in a bowl.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of brown sugar and a small amount of port wine.

  3. Serve the plums to eat and the liquid to drink.

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. Plum + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  3. Sugar + port winetop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry french plums
Supply the main fruit flavour and body of the drink, and the fruit to eat.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a deeper, caramel-like note to the liquid.
Port wine
Adds a fortified wine aroma and depth to the finished drink.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, port wine. 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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