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Dessert

Pate Des Jujubes — Jujube Paste

A sweet paste made from jujubes, currants, raisins, sugar, gum Arabic, and water, cooked until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and raisin are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,180 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, creamy. The science ↓

Pate Des Jujubes — Jujube Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Open the jujubes.

  2. Boil the jujubes with the currants and raisins in 2 quarts of water until reduced to 3 pints.

  3. Strain the mixture through a tamis cloth, twisted by two people.

Make the paste

  1. Add the sugar in syrup with the gum, previously pounded and dissolved in water.

  2. Evaporate the mixture over moderate heat.

Set and cut

  1. Pour into slightly oiled tin molds with edges about ¼ inch deep.

  2. Dry in the stove, remove from the tins, and cut into small diamonds.

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. Currant + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,180 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, creamy).

  2. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  4. Jujube + raisintop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together0 recipes

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

  5. Jujube + sugartop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5 recipes

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

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Gum arabic
Gives the paste body and helps it set into a firm, cuttable form.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates, helps the paste firm and keep.
Jujubes
Provide the main fruit flavour and body when boiled down.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and fruity flavour to the boiled base.
Currants
Add tart fruit flavour and body to the boiled base.

The step that matters

Evaporate the mixture over moderate heat. Gum Arabic and sugar set firm only once enough water has evaporated. Too little reduction leaves the paste soft and sticky, while overheating can scorch the sugar and darken it.

Swap the jujube

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Jujubethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against currant, raisin, 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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