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Preserve

Green Gage Plums

Preserved green gage plums cooked with vine leaves and sweet syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Green Gage Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Gather plums just before they are ripe.

  2. Lay vine leaves in the bottom of a pan and layer the plums with leaves in between.

  3. Cover the plums with water and heat on moderate fire until hot.

  4. Skim the water.

  5. Transfer plums to a sieve to cool.

  6. Peel the plums.

Blanch and rest

  1. Return them to the boiling water with fresh leaves.

  2. Boil for three minutes, keeping steam in as much as possible.

  3. Let plums sit away from the fire for six to seven hours until they turn green.

  4. Drain the plums in a sieve.

Syrup and jar

  1. Boil them in a clear syrup once a day for three days.

  2. Transfer plums to jars.

  3. Skim the syrup.

  4. Pour it over the plums when nearly cold.

  5. Cover with brandy paper and seal tightly.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Plum + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Green gage plums
Provide the fruit that is softened and preserved whole in the syrup.
Sugar
Forms the clear syrup that sweetens the plums and helps preserve them.
Vine leaves
Layered with the plums during heating, adding aroma and helping keep the fruit's green colour.

The step that matters

Let plums sit away from the fire until they turn green. Resting the plums off heat for six to seven hours lets the colour develop gradually. Keeping them off direct heat avoids cooking the fruit further and turning it dull.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup. 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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