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Dessert

Plum Butter

A preserve made by cooking plums with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,313 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Plum Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the plums and cook them until tender.

  2. Pass the cooked plums through a coarse colander to remove the stones.

  3. Boil the fruit for 10 minutes.

Make the butter

  1. Add an equal amount of sugar to the fruit and cook until thick, watching closely to prevent scorching.

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 + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 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

Plums
Provide the main fruit flavour and natural pectin, which helps the purée set as it cooks down.
Sugar
Sweetens the butter and, as it cooks down, adds body and helps it keep its thick texture.

The step that matters

Cooking the fruit with the sugar. Once the sugar goes in, the mixture thickens and sits close to the bottom of the pan, where it can scorch. Sugar darkens and burns at high heat, so keep the heat moderate and stir often.

“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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