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Dessert

Preserved Magnum Bonum Plums

A preserved plum dish using plums, sugar, and water, boiled and layered in syrup.

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 ↓

Preserved Magnum Bonum Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Pour boiling water over the plums and cover until cold.

  2. Remove the skins from the plums.

Make the syrup and soak

  1. Boil the water and sugar together for 5 minutes.

  2. Place the plums in a deep jar.

  3. Pour the boiling sugar over them.

  4. Let the plums stand for 24 hours.

  5. Pour the syrup back into the preserving pan.

  6. Boil for a few minutes.

  7. Pour the syrup over the plums again.

  8. Let stand for another 24 hours.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil the syrup once more.

  2. Add the plums.

  3. Boil gently for 20-30 minutes until clear and tender.

  4. Carefully transfer the plums to a dish or jar with a skimmer.

  5. Boil the syrup until thick and rich, about 10 more minutes.

  6. Pour it over the plums.

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
Hold their shape and become tender and clear during the repeated syrup soaking and simmering.
Sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and forms a thick syrup that preserves it and gives sweetness.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup soaking and boiling. Each boil must be brief and the plums must stand in the hot syrup between boils so sugar slowly penetrates the fruit. Boiling too hard or too long can break the skins and make the plums collapse before they turn clear.

“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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