Why it works: Egg and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
To Preserve Plums Without the Skins
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the plums
Pour boiling water over the plums and let them sit until cool, then remove the skins.
Make and pour the syrup
Make a syrup by boiling 1 pound of sugar with 1 teacup of water until hot.
Pour the hot syrup over the plums and let them sit for 1-2 days.
Drain the syrup, boil it again, skim off any scum, and pour it hot over the plums.
Let the plums sit until the next day, then gently boil them in the syrup until clear.
Pack and finish
Use a skimmer to transfer the plums into pots or jars.
Boil the syrup until rich and thick, then let it cool and settle before pouring it over the plums.
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.
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Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together122,807 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Plums
- Provide the fruit that is preserved and becomes tender and clear in the syrup.
- Sugar
- Forms the syrup that preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness.
- Water
- Dissolves the sugar so it can form a syrup that soaks into the fruit.
The step that matters
Repeated syrup boiling and resting. Sugar must concentrate gradually through repeated heating and resting, so the fruit absorbs syrup without collapsing. Skimming removes scum that would spoil the preserve.
“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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