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Damson Plums, Canned

Canned damson plums preserved with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Damson Plums, Canned

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the plums in cold water and drain them.

  2. Remove any blemished plums.

  3. Weigh the plums.

Cook

  1. In a preserving kettle, combine sugar and water and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the plums and stir gently with a skimmer until they begin to boil.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes.

Jar

  1. Transfer the hot plums into hermetically sealed glass jars.

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

Damson plums
Provide the fruit, whose tartness and pectin shape the flavor and gel of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture and inhibiting spoilage.

The step that matters

Boil for 5 minutes. Boiling the plums in the sugar syrup for the full time helps the fruit hold its shape and heats it enough to support safe storage in sealed jars. Stopping early can leave the fruit underprocessed.

“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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