Skip to main content
Dessert

Wild Plum Preseryes

Preserves made from wild plums, baking soda, sugar, and water, boiled until syrupy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Preseryes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Scald the plums in water with baking soda to tenderize the skins.

  2. Pour off the water and drain the plums.

  3. Remove the pits from the plums.

  4. Weigh the plums.

Make the syrup

  1. Add an equal weight of sugar over the plums with a little water.

  2. Boil the mixture and skim off any foam.

  3. Add the plums.

  4. Cook until tender.

  5. Skim the plums out.

  6. Boil the syrup down until it reaches a molasses-like consistency.

  7. Pour the syrup over the plums.

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

Wild plums
Provide the fruit, which is cooked until tender and set in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled down, thickens the syrup to a molasses-like consistency.
Baking soda
Softens the plum skins during scalding so the fruit cooks tender.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup down. Reducing the sugar syrup concentrates it and drives off water, so it thickens to a molasses-like consistency. Stopping too early leaves a thin syrup that may not preserve well; boiling too long can make it stiff or caramelize.

“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

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes