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Dessert

Plum Butter

A fruit preserve made by cooking plums with water, sugar, and optional spices or apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

  1. Cook plums in a little water until tender.

  2. Run the plums through a colander to remove stones and skins.

  3. Sweeten the plum pulp with sugar to taste and add spices if desired.

  4. Cook the mixture until thick.

  5. If the tart flavor is too strong, mix in an equal quantity of cooked apple sauce.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Plum + saucetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together197 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sugar and apple 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

Plums
Provide the main fruit pulp and the tart flavor that defines the butter.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the plum pulp.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture until thick. Pectin and sugar concentrate as water evaporates, so the butter sets. Stopping too early leaves a runny spread, while cooking too long can scorch the sugars on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the apple

The recipe marks apple as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (plum, sugar, sauce):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, sauce. 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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