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Dessert

Plum Jam

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

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 ↓

Plum Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place plums in a kettle and add enough water to just cover them.

  2. Cook the plums until they crack open and become soft.

Make the jam

  1. Add the sugar and stir gently to dissolve.

  2. Continue cooking until the mixture thickens.

Jar

  1. Pour into jars and seal.

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, pectin and acid that give the jam its body and flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with cooking, thickens it and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Continue cooking until the mixture thickens. Jam sets as pectin and sugar concentrate with water evaporating. Stopping too early leaves a runny jam, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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