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Dessert

Plum Butter

A preserved fruit spread made by cooking plums and sweet apples with sugar and water, then sealing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plum Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cook plums and sweet apples in separate kettles with enough water to prevent burning until quite soft.

  2. Pass the soft fruit through a colander into the same kettle.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Add ¾ pound of white sugar for each pound of fruit.

  2. Cook for 30 minutes and then seal.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Plums
Make up the bulk of the butter and give it its main fruit flavour.
Sweet apples
Add body and natural pectin, helping the butter thicken as it cooks.
White sugar
Sweetens the butter and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cooking the fruit until quite soft. The fruit must be soft enough to pass through a colander, and enough water keeps it from scorching. Fruit that is undercooked will not press through smoothly, leaving lumps and an uneven texture in the finished butter.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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