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Dessert

Canned Plums

Canned plums are plums preserved in a sugar syrup.

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 ↓

Canned Plums

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the plums and place them whole into a syrup made from 1 pint of water and 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Boil the syrup for 8 minutes.

  3. Can the plums and seal immediately.

  4. Prick the plums with a fork before placing them in the syrup to prevent bursting.

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 main fruit flavor and the soft, juicy texture of the finished canned fruit.
White granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and body to the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Prick the plums before adding them to the syrup. Pricking breaks the skin so syrup can penetrate the fruit evenly. Without it, the skins can split from heat and pressure, which lets the fruit burst and lose its shape.

“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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