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Dessert

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums sweetened with sugar and boiled in syrup, then sealed in jars.

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 ↓

Preserved Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Gather plums before they are too ripe.

  2. Pour scalding water over a few plums at a time to remove the skins.

  3. Peel the plums.

  4. Place the plums in cold water to prevent discoloration.

  5. Drain the plums on a sieve.

  6. Weigh the plums.

Cook the plums

  1. Use 1 pound of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  2. Make a syrup as directed in Widdifield's receipts.

  3. Add the plums to the syrup.

  4. Boil gently until they appear clear.

Jar and seal

  1. Transfer the plums to jars.

  2. Cover with brandy paper.

  3. Seal with paper.

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 fruit that is preserved and becomes the main body of the dish.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Boil gently until the plums appear clear. Boiling too hard can break the fruit apart and toughen the skins, while stopping too early leaves the plums underdeveloped and less fully infused with syrup.

“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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