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Dessert

Canned Plums

Preserve plums in a sugar syrup by simmering and canning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and syrup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,842 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Canned Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select fine plums and prick each with a needle to prevent bursting.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pot, combine ¾ pound sugar and 1 pint water to make a syrup.

Cook and jar

  1. Simmer the plums in the syrup for 5 minutes.

  2. Transfer the plums to a jar and pour in the hot syrup.

  3. Seal the jar.

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. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Plum + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the main fruit, flavor and texture of the finished preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, dissolved in the syrup, helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Pouring the hot syrup into the jar. Hot syrup helps drive air out of the jar and keeps the plums fully submerged. Pricking the plums beforehand lets syrup penetrate the fruit instead of bursting the skins.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, syrup. 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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