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Dessert

Spiced Plums

A preserved plum dish made with sugar, vinegar, and spices, simmered and jarred.

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 sugar and vinegar with the spices in a bag in a pot, then boil for a few minutes.

  2. Remove the pot from heat and let it cool.

Prepare the plums

  1. Using a fork, pick the plums 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 it over the fruit.

Finish and seal

  1. Transfer the fruit to glass jars and boil the juice until it becomes rich.

  2. Pour the thickened juice over the plums and seal the jars.

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 softens and absorbs the spiced syrup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit and thicken the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavour to the syrup.
Cloves
Adds strong aromatic spice flavour to the syrup.
Allspice
Adds warm, mixed-spice aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the juice until rich. Boiling concentrates the sugar and reduces the liquid, so the juice thickens. Stopping too early leaves a thin syrup that may not keep well.

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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