Name: Green Gage Plums
Ingredients: green gage plums; cold water; sugar

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 ↓

Green Gage Plums

Ingredients

green gage plums
cold water
sugar

Directions

Prepare the plums

Stem and wash the plums.
Fill jars with the plums and place them in a boiler of cold water, ensuring the water does not overflow into the jars.
Boil for 30 minutes or until the plums begin to soften.

Make the syrup

Remove the jars and pour any accumulated juice into a porcelain kettle.
Add enough sugar to the juice to create a rich syrup and bring it to a boil.

Fill and seal

Fill the jars with the syrup and return them to the boiling water for an additional 10 to 15 minutes.
Remove the jars one at a time and seal them.

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.

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

Green gage plums: Provide the fruit and its juice, which becomes the base of the preserve.
Sugar: Sweetens the juice and thickens it into a rich syrup that preserves the fruit.

“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.