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Canned Plums

Plums preserved in a sugar syrup after scalding and peeling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Canned Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Pour boiling water over the plums to scald them.

  2. When the skins begin to break, pour off the water and peel the plums.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a pot, combine 1 pound of sugar with just enough water to dissolve it, creating a syrup.

  2. Add the peeled plums to the hot syrup and cook for 5 minutes.

  3. Seal the jars immediately.

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, which softens and holds its shape in the hot syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Sealing the jars immediately. Sealing while the plums and syrup are still hot helps create a vacuum and keeps air and spoilage microbes out of the jars.

“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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