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Dessert

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums sweetened and cooked in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Preserved Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Skin the plums and weigh them.

  2. Add an equal weight of sugar to the plums and mix well.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Make the syrup

  1. In the morning, pour off the juice into a kettle and bring it to a boil.

  2. Skim the juice until clear, then add the plums.

  3. Simmer for about 10 minutes until clear.

  4. Boil the syrup down a little more and pour it over the plums.

Jar

  1. Carefully transfer the plums into tumblers or small jars.

  2. Cover or seal the jars as needed.

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 that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Draws juice out of the plums and preserves them, creating a sweet syrup.

The step that matters

Skimming the juice until clear. Skimming removes foam and impurities that would cloud the syrup, so the juice must be skimmed before the plums go in.

“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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