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Dessert

Brandied Plums

A preserved plum dish made by cooking plums in a sugar syrup, optionally flavored with citrus rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Brandied Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the plums by washing and pitting them.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a saucepan, combine equal parts sugar and water to create a syrup.

  2. Add the plums to the syrup and cook until they are tender.

  3. For added flavor, include a little yellow rind of orange or lemon while cooking.

Jar and store

  1. Once cooked, transfer the plums to sterilized jars and pour the syrup over them.

  2. Seal the jars and store in a cool, dark place.

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 + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Plums
Form the main body of the dish, softening as they cook in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the plums.
Orange or lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus oils for a brighter flavor.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, 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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