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Dessert

Damson Jelly

A preserved fruit spread made from damsons, plums, sugar, and apples boiled to a jelly consistency.

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 ↓

Damson Jelly

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Bake the damsons in a slow oven or boil them in a pan of water until soft.

  2. Pour off the clear juice from the fruit, strain, and weigh it.

Boil and set

  1. Boil the juice quickly without sugar for 25 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in 10 ounces of sugar for each pound of juice.

  3. Boil quickly for 6 to 10 minutes, stirring constantly and removing any scum.

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 + appletop 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).

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

Fine ripe damsons
Provide the main fruit flavour and colour, and the juice that becomes the jelly.
Pearmains or other fine boiling apples
Add natural pectin, which helps the jelly set firm.
Good sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set and keep well.

The step that matters

Final quick boil after adding sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the quick boil, and the boil must run hot and steady for the stated 6 to 10 minutes. Too short a boil leaves the jelly runny, while too long can darken the colour and dull the flavour.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apple. 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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