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To Preserve Plums for Tarts

This preserves plums by layering them with sugar in a jar and cooling them until the sugar penetrates the fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

To Preserve Plums for Tarts

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Layer the plums

  1. Place the plums in a narrow-mouthed stone jar.

  2. Sprinkle the sugar among the plums as you layer them in the jar.

  3. Cover the jar with several layers of paper.

Cook slowly and seal

  1. Place the jar in a cool oven until the sugar has fully penetrated the fruit.

  2. Once done, cork the jar tightly and seal it with bladder.

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; its flesh softens and absorbs the sugar during slow heating.
Raw sugar
Adds sweetness and draws water out of the fruit, helping preserve it.

The step that matters

Place the jar in a cool oven until the sugar has fully penetrated the fruit. Gentle, low heat helps the sugar dissolve and slowly move into the plums without cooking or breaking them down. A hot oven would cook the fruit too quickly, while stopping too early leaves the sugar unevenly distributed and the fruit poorly preserved.

“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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