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Plum Sweetmeats

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 513 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Plum Sweetmeats

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and halve the Damson plums, removing the stones.

  2. Cook the plums over gentle heat in their own juice until soft.

  3. Rub the cooked plums through a sieve and return to the stove.

  4. Add enough sugar to sweeten and a little cinnamon.

  5. When nearly done, add wine to taste.

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 + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Plum + winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together343 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Cinnamon + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,170 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon, wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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