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Preserve

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums cooked in a sugar syrup and stored in jars.

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 ↓

Preserved Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prick each plum with a large needle.

  2. Weigh the plums and measure 1 pound of sugar and 1 pint of water for each pound of fruit.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine the sugar and water to make a syrup.

  2. Boil the syrup until clear, skimming off any scum.

Cook the plums

  1. Drop in the plums, cooking only as many as the pot can hold for 20 minutes.

  2. Remove the plums with a perforated skimmer and spread them on plates to cool.

  3. Repeat with remaining plums.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the cooled plums in small jars and pour the boiling syrup over them, then seal.

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

Plums
The fruit being preserved; pricking lets the syrup penetrate the flesh.
Sugar
Makes the syrup that preserves the fruit and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Cook only as many plums as the pot can hold. Crowding the plums drops the syrup's temperature and slows its boiling, so the fruit cooks unevenly and can break apart. Small batches keep the syrup hot and the plums intact.

“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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