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Euchered Plums

Euchered Plums are plums preserved by boiling in a sugar and vinegar solution with cinnamon.

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 ↓

Euchered Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Boil vinegar, sugar, and cinnamon together.

  2. Pour the mixture over the plums.

Repeat each morning

  1. The next morning, draw off the liquid and boil it again.

  2. Pour the liquid back over the plums.

  3. Repeat the boiling process for five mornings.

Finish

  1. On the last day, boil the fruit for about 20 minutes.

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 + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Vinegar + cinnamontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Blue plums
The main fruit, which softens and takes up flavour from the syrup over the soaking days.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out its water.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that helps preserve the fruit and balances the sweetness.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, spiced aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Drawing off and reboiling the liquid each morning. The syrup must be brought fully to a boil before it goes back over the plums. Boiling kills microbes in the liquid and dissolves the sugar completely, so each pass keeps the syrup safe and helps it penetrate the fruit.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon. 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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