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Dessert

Pickled Plums

A preserved plum dish made by soaking plums in a sugar and vinegar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 655 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Pickled Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the plums clean and place them in jars.

Make the syrup and seal

  1. Make a syrup by combining sugar and vinegar in a pot and heating until dissolved.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the plums in the jars.

  3. Seal the jars tightly.

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 + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

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

  3. 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 texture of the finished pickle.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the pickle its tang and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Pour the hot syrup over the plums. The syrup must be hot when poured so the fruit is heated through and the jar can seal well as it cools. Sugar and vinegar in the syrup also help keep the fruit preserved.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar. 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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