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Spiced Plums

Preserved plums spiced with cloves, allspice, mace, ginger, cinnamon, and peppercorns.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Plums

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash and drain the plums, then prick the skins lightly.

  2. Pack the plums in earthen jars, layering with sugar at half their weight.

  3. Add plenty of whole cloves, allspice, mace, bruised ginger, and stick cinnamon while packing.

  4. Include a few whole black peppercorns in each jar.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit that softens and releases juice into the syrup as it sits.
Sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and forms a sweet syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Layering the plums with sugar. Sugar must surround every piece of fruit so it draws out juice and forms a syrup. Gaps let the fruit spoil before the syrup forms.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, sugar, clove, allspice, ginger, cinnamon):

  1. Cardamomfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, clove, allspice, ginger, 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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