Skip to main content
Dessert

Egg Plums

Egg Plums are plums boiled in a sugar syrup until clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Egg Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Pierce the skins of the plums with a large needle.

  2. Boil the sugar with ½ cup of water to make a syrup.

Cook the plums

  1. Add the plums to the hot syrup.

  2. Boil until the plums look clear.

  3. Remove the plums to cool and repeat until all are done.

Store

  1. Store the plums for three to four days.

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
The fruit that is cooked in the syrup and becomes the dish itself.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, boiled with water, forms the syrup that preserves the fruit.

“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