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Dessert

Plum Sweetmeats

A sweet preserve made from ripe damson plums, sugar, and optional cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Plum Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, stone, and halve the damson plums.

Cook and jar

  1. Cook the plums in their own juice until soft enough to pass through a sieve.

  2. Sweeten the plum puree with sugar.

  3. If desired, add cinnamon and return to the heat.

  4. Cook until tender, then fill jars and seal immediately.

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 + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Damson plums
Provide the fruit pulp, pectin and acidity that help the preserve thicken and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with cooking, helps the preserve thicken and keep well.

The step that matters

Cook until tender, then fill jars and seal immediately.. The puree must cook long enough for pectin and sugar to thicken it, and jars filled while hot and sealed right away help keep the preserve stable during storage.

“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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