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Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking plums with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the plums

  1. Pierce each plum with a sharp fork.

  2. In a pot, cover about a quart of plums with water and cook until tender.

  3. Remove the plums to a dish.

Make the syrup

  1. Add sugar to the cooking water and melt it.

  2. Strain the syrup through cheesecloth.

  3. Return the syrup to the pot.

Finish and bottle

  1. Add the plums to the pot.

  2. If the syrup does not cover the plums, add more water.

  3. Simmer for 5 minutes.

  4. Bottle the preserves tightly.

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, flesh and natural pectin that give the preserves body and help them set.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and binds water, helping them keep and giving a thick texture.

The step that matters

Keep the plums covered with syrup. Fruit left exposed above the liquid cooks unevenly, can dry out and may darken. Adding water when the syrup falls short keeps every plum submerged so it cooks evenly.

“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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