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Dessert

Canned Plums

A preserved plum dish made by cooking plums in a sugar syrup and canning them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Canned Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the plums with a cloth and prick them with a fork.

  2. Combine water and sugar in a pot to make syrup.

Cook and can

  1. Drop the plums into the hot syrup and cook until tender.

  2. Alternatively, peel the plums and boil the skins in the water for syrup, then strain them out.

  3. Add the plums to the syrup, cook until done, and can.

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 main fruit, which softens during cooking and gives the canned product its flavor and texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and balances the tartness of the plums.

The step that matters

Cooking the plums until tender. Plums held in hot syrup keep cooking after they are removed from heat. Overcooking softens the fruit too much, so it can break apart and turn mushy in the jar.

“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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