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Pickled Plums

Pickled plums preserved in a sugar and vinegar syrup with cloves, mace, and cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Pickled Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the vinegar and sugar together until dissolved, then skim off any foam.

  2. Add cloves, mace, and cinnamon to the mixture.

Cook and pour

  1. Scald the plums until tender.

  2. Remove the plums and boil down the syrup.

  3. Pour the syrup over the plums.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Mace + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit body and flavor that the syrup soaks into and preserves.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the vinegar, helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Mace
Adds a delicate, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup.
Cinnamon
Adds sweet, woody aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil down the syrup. Reducing the syrup concentrates the sugar and vinegar, which helps preserve the plums and gives the pickling liquid body. Too little reduction leaves it thin and less protective; too much makes it overly thick and sweet.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

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