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Dessert

Spiced Plums

A preserved plum dish made by boiling plums with vinegar, sugar, and cinnamon over several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Spiced Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, boil the vinegar, sugar, and cinnamon together.

  2. Pour the hot mixture over the plums.

Steep over five days

  1. The next morning, draw off the liquid and boil it again.

  2. Pour the boiled liquid back over the plums.

  3. Repeat the boiling process for five mornings.

Finish

  1. On the last day, boil the plums for about 20 minutes.

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 + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Plum + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + cinnamontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Blue plums
Provide the fruit body that softens and absorbs the spiced syrup as it steeps.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon
Adds warm spiced aroma that infuses the syrup and the plums.

The step that matters

Draw off and reboil the syrup each morning. Reboiling the drained syrup before pouring it back keeps it hot and concentrated, so it penetrates the fruit and helps preserve it. Skipping a boil lets the syrup cool and weaken.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits about as well
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon. 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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