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Dessert

Plum Jelly

A preserved plum dessert made by boiling plums, extracting juice, 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 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 ↓

Plum Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Pour boiling water over the plums to cover them.

  2. Pour off the water immediately and drain.

  3. Put the plums in a kettle with boiling water to cover them again.

  4. Boil until they begin to open and some juice is extracted.

Make the jelly

  1. Pour off the liquid and strain it.

  2. For each pint of juice, add 1 pound of white sugar.

  3. Return the mixture to the kettle and boil for 20 to 30 minutes, as needed.

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
Provide the fruit and natural pectin and juice that set the jelly.
White sugar
Sweetens the juice and helps the jelly thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the juice with sugar for 20 to 30 minutes, as needed. Sugar and pectin only gel when the mixture reaches the right concentration. Boiling drives off water, so undercooking leaves a runny jelly, while overcooking can make it stiff or caramelised.

“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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