Skip to main content
Preserve

Preserving By Spirits

Preserves fruits by soaking them in spirits with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Plum and spirit work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Preserving By Spirits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Gather fruits before they are perfectly ripe.

  2. Soak fruits in very hard water for several hours to firm them up.

Make the spirit

  1. Prepare strong spirits and add 5 ounces of sugar for each quart.

Preserve

  1. Submerge the fruits in the prepared spirits.

  2. Seal jars tightly to prevent air access.

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 + spirittop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

  3. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fruits
Provide the flavour and texture that the spirit preserves and infuses.
Strong spirits
Preserve the fruit and extract its flavour while keeping it from spoiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the strong alcohol.

The step that matters

Submerging the fruit fully in the spirits. Fruit left exposed above the liquid can spoil. Keeping every piece covered by the alcohol helps preserve it, and sealing the jars tightly limits air contact.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes