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Dessert

Shape of French Plums

A jelly made from French plums, calf's feet jelly, and a crisp egg white topping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and egg work together. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 794 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Shape of French Plums

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the jelly

  1. Stew the French plums and remove the stones.

  2. Bruise the stones and mix them with the plums.

  3. Fill a jelly mold with the mixture and pour in the calf's feet jelly to stiffen.

Make the border and serve

  1. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and form a border on a small serving dish.

  2. Bake the egg whites in a 400°F (200°C) oven until crisp and white.

  3. Turn out the jelly mold onto the egg white border.

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 + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together794 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

French plums
Provide the fruit flavour and body of the jelly once stewed.
Calves' feet jelly
Provides gelatin that sets the mixture into a firm jelly.
Whites of eggs
Whipped to stiff peaks, they form a crisp, white border when baked.

The step that matters

Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks. Egg whites hold air only when whipped to stiff peaks, and under-whipped or greasy whites will collapse and fail to bake into a sturdy, crisp border.

“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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