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Dessert

Spiced Plums

A preserved plum dish flavored with cinnamon, cloves, allspice, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine cinnamon, cloves, and allspice in a bag and boil with sugar and vinegar for a few minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and let cool.

Pour and store

  1. Pick the plums with a fork and place them in a jar.

  2. Pour the cooled syrup over the plums.

  3. Heat the juice for three mornings, allowing it to cool each time before pouring over the fruit.

  4. Boil the juice down until rich, then pour over the plums and store.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Plum + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together446 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit that is preserved and flavoured by the spiced syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, sweet aroma to the syrup.
Cloves
Contributes strong, pungent spice aroma to the syrup.
Allspice
Contributes warm, mixed-spice aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Heating the juice over three mornings. Each reheating and cooling cycle lets the syrup soak into the fruit without cooking it soft. Letting the juice cool fully before each pour prevents the fruit from cooking and splitting, and the repeated heating helps keep the preserve stable.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice. 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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