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Green Gage Plums

Plums stewed in sugar syrup and brandy, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 168 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Green Gage Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Scald the plums.

  2. Wipe the plums clean.

  3. Pierce each plum with a needle.

Make the syrup and cook the plums

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and a little water to create a syrup.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil.

  3. Add the plums to the boiling syrup.

  4. Reduce heat to low.

  5. Simmer until the plums are clear.

  6. Remove the plums.

  7. Spread them on dishes to cool.

  8. Pour the syrup into a tureen.

  9. Let it cool completely.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the plums into half-pint tumblers.

  2. Fill the tumblers with syrup.

  3. Top each tumbler with 2 teaspoons of brandy.

  4. Cut a round piece of white paper to fit the tumbler top. Soak the paper in brandy.

  5. Place the soaked paper on top. Seal the tumbler tightly with paper.

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 + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + plumtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the plums and helps preserve them.
Green gage plums
Provide the fruit that is cooked until clear and packed in syrup.

The step that matters

Simmer until the plums are clear. Cooking the plums gently in syrup lets sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, so they keep their shape and become clear. Boiling hard can split the skins and break the fruit apart.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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