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Dessert

Plum Butter

A spread made by cooking plums and apples with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plum Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cook the apples and plums in separate pots with a small amount of water until soft.

  2. Pass the cooked fruit through a coarse sieve to extract the pulp.

Make the butter

  1. For each pound of pulp, mix in ¾ pound of sugar.

  2. Cook the mixture until it thickens to the consistency of apple butter, about 2 hours.

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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Wild plums
Provide the main fruit flavour and pulp for the butter.
Sweet apples
Add pectin and body, helping the butter thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the butter and helps it thicken as moisture cooks off.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture until it thickens. Sugar and pulp must cook long enough for water to evaporate and the mixture to concentrate. Stopping early leaves a runny butter, while overcooking can scorch the sugars on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar. 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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