Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Butter

A preserve made by cooking plums and sweet apples with sugar until soft, then sealing in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Plum and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plum Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cook the plums in a kettle with just enough water to prevent sticking until quite soft.

  2. In a separate kettle, cook the sweet apples with enough water until soft.

Combine and sweeten

  1. Pass both the plums and apples through a colander into the same kettle.

  2. Add 4 pounds of white sugar for every pound of the mixture.

Cook and seal

  1. Let the mixture cook for 1 hour.

  2. Seal the plum butter in jars.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the main flavor and pulp that thickens the butter as it cooks.
Sweet apples
Add pectin and a smooth body that helps the butter set.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and thickens the butter while helping it keep.

The step that matters

Cooking the combined mixture. As water evaporates, the sugar and fruit pulp thicken and can scorch on the bottom of the kettle. The mixture must cook long enough to reach a spreadable thickness.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes