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Dessert

Preserved and Dried Fruit

A method of preserving small fruits in sugar syrup and drying them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and plum 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 ↓

Preserved and Dried Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a porcelain kettle, layer the fruit at the bottom and add the sugar.

  2. Heat until the sugar dissolves, then boil for 1-2 minutes.

  3. Skim the syrup and spread the fruit on plates to dry in a partly cooled oven.

  4. Boil the syrup until thickened, then pour it over the currants and dry them together.

Store

  1. Pack the dried fruit in paper sacks or a box lined with paper and store in a dry, cool place.

  2. To prevent moths, add a few sprigs of dry sassafras.

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. Sugar + plumtop 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

Sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and preserves it as a thick syrup.
Fruit
Provides the flavour and the body of the preserved product.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until thickened. Sugar concentration must be high enough to preserve the fruit. Undercooked syrup leaves too much water, so the fruit can spoil or ferment instead of keeping.

“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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