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Sauce

Plum Sauce

A sweet and spicy sauce made from plums, sugar, vinegar, spices, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Plum Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Combine plums, sugar, vinegar, cayenne pepper, salt, allspice, cloves, and bruised ginger in a large pot.

  2. Boil the mixture until the stones separate from the plums.

  3. Strain the sauce through a colander.

Store

  1. Bottle the sauce for storage.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit base, with natural pectin and acidity that give the sauce body and tang.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, when boiled down, thickens the sauce and helps preserve it.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the sauce.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat that gives the sauce its sharp, spicy character.

The step that matters

Boil until the stones separate from the plums. The sauce must boil long enough for the fruit to break down and release its flesh from the stones. Undercooked fruit leaves the sauce thin and clinging to the pits, while sustained boiling concentrates the sugar and vinegar so the sauce thickens and keeps well.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, pepper, allspice, clove, ginger. 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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