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Plum Cordial

A homemade plum cordial made by steeping hog plums in spirits and sweetening with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and spirit work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Plum Cordial

Ingredients

Directions

Steep

  1. Fill a jug with August hog plums.

  2. Pour spirits over the plums until the jug is full.

  3. Allow to steep for 2 to 3 months.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Carefully pour off the liquid and strain it through a coarse cloth.

  2. Sweeten the cordial to taste.

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 + spirittop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  3. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

August hog plums
Supply the fruit flavour and colour that infuse into the spirit during steeping.
Spirits
Extract and preserve the fruit flavour, acting as the solvent for the cordial.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the sharpness of the fruit and spirit.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, sugar. 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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