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Dessert

Wild Plum Jelly

A jelly made from plums, water, and sugar.

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 ↓

Wild Plum Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the plums

  1. Fill a preserving kettle with plums and cover them with water.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Drain off the water once the plums begin to burst.

  4. Fill the kettle with water again.

  5. Boil until the plums are cooked to pieces.

  6. Drain off the water.

Make the jelly

  1. Add ½ cup of sugar for every pint of plum juice.

  2. Cook until the mixture jellies.

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
Supply the juice, natural pectin and acidity that allow the jelly to set and give it flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and, as it cooks down, helps the mixture thicken and set into jelly.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture jellies. The jelly sets only when enough water has evaporated and the sugar, pectin and acid are in balance. Stopping too early leaves a runny syrup, while cooking too long can make the jelly stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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