Skip to main content
Dessert

Canned Plums

A preserved fruit dish made by packing plums in jars, covering with boiled sugar water syrup, and heating until soft.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Wash the plums.

  2. Pack them in hot jars.

  3. Make syrup by boiling 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar together for 10 minutes.

  4. Pour the syrup over the plums.

Process and fill

  1. Lay the cover on the jars loosely.

  2. Place the jars in a 350°F (175°C) oven until the plums are soft, about 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the jars from the oven and use a silver knife to remove air bubbles.

  4. Refill the jars to overflowing with plums that have been cooked for this purpose.

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
The fruit itself, which softens in the oven and gives the jars their flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup that surrounds the fruit in the jars.

“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

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes