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Dessert

Orleans Plum

A preserved fruit made by boiling plums in sugar syrup and storing in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Orleans Plum

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare clean, dry wide-necked bottles.

  2. Rub the plums with a soft cloth without damaging the skins.

  3. Place the plums into the bottles.

Make the syrup and fill

  1. Make a syrup by boiling ¾ pound of sugar with ½ pint of water for 10 minutes.

  2. Fill the bottles with the syrup.

Seal and heat

  1. Cork the bottles tightly and cover with moistened bladder.

  2. Place the bottles in a large pan of water over gentle heat.

  3. Boil the water for 15 minutes, then remove the pan from heat.

  4. Leave the bottles in the water until it cools.

  5. Store the bottles in a dry place.

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 + 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

Orleans plums
The fruit itself; its flesh softens during heating and its juice mingles with the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in the syrup, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cork the bottles tightly. An airtight seal keeps air and microbes out while the bottles are heated and cooling, so the plums stay preserved. A loose cork lets air in and the fruit can spoil.

“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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