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Dessert

Preserved Egg Plums

Preserved plums in a sugar syrup, layered and cooked until skins break.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and plum 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 ↓

Preserved Egg Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Wash and dry the plums.

  2. In a preserving kettle, combine the sugar with enough water to dissolve it and heat on low until simmering.

Cook the plums in layers

  1. Prick each plum with a needle or fork and add a layer to the syrup.

  2. Cook until the plums lose some color and the skins begin to break.

  3. Remove the plums with a skimmer and place them in a large dish to cool.

  4. Repeat with additional layers of plums, cooking and cooling each layer in the same manner.

  5. Carefully replace any broken skins to maintain appearance.

  6. Once all layers are cooked, return the first layer to the kettle and boil until transparent.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the cooked plums in glass jars while the last layer cools.

  2. Pour the hot syrup over the plums and seal the jars once cooled.

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. Sugar + plumtop 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

Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the plums and preserves them.
Plums
The fruit being preserved, softened and made translucent by cooking in syrup.

The step that matters

Cook until the skins begin to break. Pricking and gentle simmering let syrup penetrate the fruit evenly. Overcooking at a hard boil can split skins and make the plums collapse, while undercooking leaves the flesh firm and the sugar unable to fully replace the fruit's water.

“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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