Name: Preserves and Marmalades
Ingredients: 1.5 pounds sugar; 1 pound water; Fruit of choice (e.g., cherries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, strawberries, whortleberries, pie plant, pears, peaches, pineapples, crab apples, sour apples, currants, wild grapes, tomatoes)

Why it works: Plum and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Preserves and Marmalades

Ingredients

1.5 pounds sugar
1 pound water
Fruit of choice (e.g., cherries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, strawberries, whortleberries, pie plant, pears, peaches, pineapples, crab apples, sour apples, currants, wild grapes, tomatoes)

Directions

Make the syrup

Combine 1.5 pounds of sugar with 1 pound of water to make a syrup.

Cook the fruit

Boil each type of fruit for the specified time: cherries 5 minutes, raspberries 6 minutes, blackberries 6 minutes, plums 10 minutes, strawberries 8 minutes, whortleberries 5 minutes, pie plant 10 minutes, small sour pears 30 minutes, Bartlett pears 20 minutes, peaches halves 8 minutes, peaches whole 15 minutes, pineapples sliced ½ inch thick 15 minutes, crab apples 25 minutes, sour apples quartered 10 minutes, currants 6 minutes, wild grapes 10 minutes, tomatoes 20 minutes.

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.

Plum + peartop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together649 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Plum + peachtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together163 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pear + peachtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together114 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar: Sweetens the fruit and, with the water, forms the syrup that preserves it.
Fruit of choice: Provides the main flavor and body of the preserve; cooking times vary by type.

The step that matters

Timing the boil for each fruit. Fruits differ in firmness and pectin, so boiling each type for its own time matters. Undercooking leaves fruit firm and underset, while overcooking breaks it down and can make it dull or mushy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, plum, pear, peach, pineapple, crab, apple):

Apricotfits better
Quincefits better
Vanillafits better
Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, plum, pear, peach, pineapple, crab, apple. 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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Preserves and Marmalades