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Dessert

Green Gage Plums, Canned

Canned green gage plums are preserved by cooking plums with sugar and water, then jarred and sealed.

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 ↓

Green Gage Plums, Canned

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select plums that are not fully ripe and remove any spotted ones.

  2. Wash the plums in two waters and weigh them.

Make and heat the syrup

  1. In a porcelain preserving kettle, combine sugar and water until dissolved.

  2. Add the plums to the kettle and set over low heat.

  3. Gently turn the plums with a large skimmer to heat evenly without breaking.

  4. When the skins curl and split, they are ready to can; do not let them boil.

  5. If needed, add a little hot water to ensure there is enough syrup.

Can

  1. Transfer the plums into glass jars and seal them hermetically.

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

Green gage plums
Provide the fruit, whose flesh and skin soften and split during gentle heating.
White granulated sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that fills the jars.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that surrounds the plums and keeps them moist.

The step that matters

Keep the plums from boiling. Boiling toughens and breaks down the fruit, so gentle low heat keeps the plums whole while the skins split and the fruit softens.

“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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