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Egg-plum Preserves

Preserves made from ripe plums and sugar boiled into a syrup.

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 ↓

Egg-plum Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Pierce the skins of the plums.

  2. In a pot, combine 2 cups of sugar with just enough water to make a syrup.

  3. Boil the syrup for 5 minutes and skim off any foam.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the plums to the syrup and boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Transfer the preserves to glass jars and seal them tightly.

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, pectin and tartness that form the body of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and helps thicken the syrup as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling the plums in the syrup for 15 minutes. Sugar and fruit must reach a thick, sticky set while the fruit stays intact. Boiling too briefly leaves the preserves runny, while overcooking can make them dark and overly firm.

“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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