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Dessert

Plum Paste

A sweet plum preserve made by boiling plums, straining, reducing, adding sugar, clarifying, and setting in molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Plum Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pulp

  1. Remove the stones from the plums and place them in a pan with a little water.

  2. Boil the plums until they turn into a jam.

  3. Pass the jam through a fine sieve to extract the pulp.

  4. Place the pulp back on the fire to reduce it further.

Make the paste

  1. Weigh the reduced pulp and add an equal weight of loaf sugar.

  2. Clarify the mixture and boil it until it reaches the great ball stage.

  3. Mix and boil the entire mixture together.

  4. Pour it into molds and allow it to dry.

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 pulp that forms the body and flavour of the paste.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it boils down, helps the paste set firm and hold its shape.

The step that matters

Boiling to the great ball stage. Sugar concentration determines whether the paste sets firm. Boiling too little leaves it soft and sticky, while boiling too long can make it hard and brittle.

“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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