Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums boiled in a sugar syrup until soaked and then jarred.

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

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

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling sugar and water together.

  2. Once boiling and well skimmed, prick the plums with a coarse needle.

Simmer the plums

  1. Drop the plums into the syrup a few at a time.

  2. Boil the plums gently in the syrup for 20 minutes or until thoroughly soaked.

  3. Remove the plums with a skimmer and pack them into jars, filling them halfway.

Thicken and jar

  1. Boil the syrup for 20 minutes or more until thick.

  2. Fill the jars to the top with the thick syrup and let them cool.

  3. Finish the next day as directed for Peaches Preserved in Syrup.

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 itself, softening as it soaks up the syrup while keeping its shape and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration in the syrup, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar must be concentrated enough to draw water out of the fruit and slow spoilage. A syrup that is not boiled down long enough stays thin, so the preserves keep poorly.

“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.

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes