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Plum Preserves

A preserve made by cooking plums with tomato and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and plum are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,480 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Plum Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the tomato into three pieces.

  2. Add the tomato pieces to the plums.

  3. Pour boiling water over the mixture.

  4. Boil until ready to pit.

Pit and add sugar

  1. Remove the tomato from the plums.

  2. Remove the pits from the plums.

  3. Add an equal measure of sugar to the plums.

  4. Stir until it boils.

  5. Skim out the plums.

Make the syrup and jar

  1. Cook the syrup until thick.

  2. Pour the thick syrup over the plums in a 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. Tomato + plumtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,480 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Main fruit; its flesh and juice form the body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup as water cooks off.
Tomato
Adds acidity and body to the preserve.

The step that matters

Cook the syrup until thick. As water evaporates, the sugar concentration rises, so the syrup thickens and helps preserve the fruit. Stopping too early leaves a runny syrup that may spoil sooner, while cooking too long can make it overly stiff and sticky.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, 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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