Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Preserves

Preserves made by boiling plums with sugar and water, optionally with hay, then cooling and storing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plum Preserves

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very cool oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the jars

  1. Combine plums and sugar in a jar, ensuring sugar is added after the fruit without shaking it down.

  2. Seal the jars with a bladder and secure with paper or cork.

Cook and rest

  1. Place jars in a pan of cold water with hay between them, and boil gently for about 3 hours.

  2. Alternatively, bake in a cool oven at 300°F (150°C) for 4 to 5 hours.

  3. Leave the plums in the syrup for a few days before serving.

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
Provide the fruit that is cooked and preserved in its own syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws water out to form a syrup that helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Heat gently. Gentle heat cooks the plums through without breaking them apart or forcing the sealed jars to boil hard and loosen. Slow cooking also lets the sugar syrup penetrate the fruit evenly.

“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.

More plum preserves recipes

Green Gage 10Mogul 4Wild 4Damson 3Green 3Purple 3 See all 28 →

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes