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Dessert

French Plums, Stewed

Stewed French plums simmered with water, sugar, lemon, and optional port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

French Plums, Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. In a clean stewpan, add enough water to cover the plums and stew them for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the plums and boil the water with the sugar until clear and well skimmed.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the lemon rind, lemon juice, and plums to the syrup and simmer gently for 1½ hours.

  2. If desired, add the port wine with the plums for extra flavor.

  3. Serve in a glass dish.

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 + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Plum + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Lemon + port winetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

French plums
Provide the fruit that softens during stewing and forms the body of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the plums keep their shape and gloss.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup and balances its flavor.
Port wine
Adds depth and a rich, aromatic flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Skimming the syrup. Boiling sugar and water produces foam and impurities on the surface. Skimming them off keeps the syrup clear and clean-tasting, so the final dish looks and tastes refined.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, port wine. 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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