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Plum, Cherry, Pineapple and Peach Soup

A chilled soup made from plums, cherries, pineapple, or peaches, water, sugar, cornstarch, and citrus juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Plum, Cherry, Pineapple and Peach Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Cook the fruit with water in a pot until very soft.

  2. Mash the fruit and sift to remove solids.

  3. Sweeten the mixture slightly with sugar.

  4. Thicken the soup a little with cornstarch dissolved in water.

  5. Add lemon or orange juice to enhance flavor.

Serve

  1. Serve very cold with chipped ice.

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

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

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

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

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

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

Fruit
Provides the main flavor and, once cooked and sifted, the body of the soup.
Cornstarch
Thickens the liquid slightly when heated, giving the soup a light body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the fruit.
Lemon or orange juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the fruit.

The step that matters

Thicken the soup a little with cornstarch dissolved in water. Cornstarch must be fully dissolved in cold water before it is stirred into hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. Starch thickens only when the mixture is heated enough to swell the granules, so the soup needs to simmer briefly after adding it.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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