Skip to main content
Dessert

Black Plum Jam

Jam made from ripe black muscle plums and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Black Plum Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Cut the plums into pieces and remove the stones.

  2. Place the plums in a large copper pan and bruise them with a paddle.

  3. Warm the plums over the fire until soft.

  4. Pass the mixture through a colander using a pestle to extract as much as possible.

Cook the jam

  1. Boil the mixture for one hour, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

  2. Add 6 ounces of powdered sugar for every pound of jam and mix well.

  3. Return the mixture to the fire for an additional 10 minutes.

  4. Transfer the jam to brown pans and sift powdered sugar over the top.

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

Black muscle plums
Provide the fruit, pectin and tartness that form the jam's body and flavour.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and, through its concentration, helps the jam thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Stirring during the one-hour boil. Jam is dense and sugary, so it sticks and scorches on the base of the pan. Constant stirring prevents burning and keeps the flavour clean.

“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.

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes