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Dessert

Spiced Plums

A preserved plum dish flavored with cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, sweetened with sugar and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine cinnamon, cloves, and allspice in a bag.

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, combine plums, sugar, and vinegar, then bring to a boil for a few minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and let cool.

Pack and pour

  1. Using a fork, pick the plums and place them in a jar.

  2. Pour the syrup over the plums.

Reduce and store

  1. Heat the juice for three mornings, allowing it to cool each time before pouring it over the fruit.

  2. Pack the fruit into glass jars and boil the juice down until rich.

  3. Cool the juice and pour it over the fruit, then seal and store.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Plum + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together446 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
Form the main fruit body and supply the flavor and texture of the preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit by binding water in the syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon
Provides warm, sweet aroma that infuses the syrup and fruit.
Cloves
Provides a strong, pungent aroma that flavors the syrup and fruit.
Allspice
Provides a warm, peppery aroma that rounds out the spice blend.

The step that matters

Heating the juice over several mornings. Reheating and cooling the syrup repeatedly lets it soak into the fruit gradually. Pouring very hot syrup over fruit can soften it too much and break it down before it has absorbed the flavor.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

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