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Dessert

Wild Plum Preserves

Preserves made by scalding plums with baking soda, adding sugar, cooking until tender, and reducing syrup to molasses consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Wild Plum Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Scald the plums in a solution of saleratus and water to tenderize the skins and reduce the strong taste.

  2. When the skins start to break, pour off the water and drain the plums.

  3. Remove the pits and weigh the plums, using an equal weight of sugar.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Place the sugar over the plums with a little water and bring to a boil, skimming off any foam.

  2. Add the plums to the boiling syrup and cook until tender, then remove the plums.

  3. Boil the syrup down until it reaches the consistency of molasses, then pour it over the plums.

  4. No sealing is required.

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, whose flesh softens and whose skins are tenderized by the alkaline scald.
Saleratus (baking soda)
Alkaline solution that softens the skins and reduces the plums' strong, bitter taste.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled down into syrup, thickens and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup down. Sugar must concentrate until it reaches molasses-like thickness; if it is under-boiled the syrup stays thin and the preserve may spoil, while over-boiling can scorch or make it too stiff.

“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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