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Dessert

Garfield Butter

A fruit butter made from plums, peaches, and sugar, cooked, sieved, and preserved in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Garfield Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, pit, and slice the peaches.

  2. Remove pits from freestone plums.

Make the butter

  1. Cook the peaches and plums together slowly until soft.

  2. Rub the mixture through a colander or coarse sieve.

  3. Add ¾ cup of sugar for each cup of pulp and cook slowly, stirring often until thick.

  4. Pack the hot butter into sterilized jars and cover with hot paraffin.

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 + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. 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 most of the pulp and tart flavour that give the butter its body.
Peaches
Add sweet, mellow fruit flavour and extra pulp to the butter.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, with long cooking, thickens the pulp into a spreadable butter.

The step that matters

Cooking the pulp with sugar until thick. Sugar must be added to the pulp and cooked slowly, stirring often, so the mixture thickens without scorching on the bottom of the pan. Too little cooking leaves it runny, and too much or too fast heat can burn the sugar.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar. 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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