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Preserve

Recipe for Preserving Plums

This recipe preserves plums by cooking them with sugar until the mixture boils.

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 ↓

Recipe for Preserving Plums

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Weigh the plums and place them in a preserving kettle, crushing a few.

Cook the plums

  1. Leave the plums on low heat until the juices are drawn out.

  2. Move the kettle forward and cook the plums slowly until thoroughly done.

Add the sugar

  1. Add 1 pound of heated sugar to the plums, including stones and skin.

  2. Heat until the sugar melts and the mixture boils for about 3 minutes.

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, acidity and pectin that give the preserve its body and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it dissolves and boils, helps thicken and preserve the mixture.

The step that matters

Cooking the plums slowly until thoroughly done. Slow cooking on low heat draws out juices gently, so the fruit softens and releases pectin before the sugar is added. Rushing this can leave the fruit firm and the set uneven.

“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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