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Dessert

Plum Butter

A fruit preserve made by cooking plums and apples with sugar and sealing in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 plums in a pot with enough water to prevent sticking until soft.

  2. Cook apples in a separate pot with enough water to prevent sticking until soft.

  3. Pass the soft fruit through a colander into the same pot.

Make the butter

  1. For each pound of fruit, add ½ pound of white sugar.

  2. Cook for a short time.

Jar

  1. Seal 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 bulk and main flavour of the butter once cooked and strained.
Sweet apples
Add pectin, which helps the butter thicken as it cooks down.
White sugar
Sweetens the butter and thickens it as water evaporates during cooking.

The step that matters

Cooking after the sugar is added. Sugar thickens the butter only as water evaporates during cooking. Too short a cook leaves the butter runny, while too long a cook can scorch it on the bottom of the pot.

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.

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