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Dessert

Mixed Fruit Jam or Fruit Preserves

A jam made by stewing apples and plums with sugar and optional magenta coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and plum 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 ↓

Mixed Fruit Jam or Fruit Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Fill a steam tub with cooking apples and cover it.

  2. Turn on the steam for 20 minutes until the apples are squashed.

  3. Bruise any whole apples against the side of the tub with a long spoon.

  4. Fill the tub to the top with cold water and turn on the steam gently until it boils.

  5. Rub the mixture through a fine sieve to remove the seeds.

Make the jam

  1. Measure 5 pails of the pulp into a jam pan and add 9 lbs of sugar for the apples.

  2. Add 28 lbs of plums and 21 lbs of sugar for them.

  3. Boil the mixture with good steam and color with magenta crystal if desired.

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. Apple + plumtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + plumtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

Apple and sugar 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

Cooking apples
Provide the pectin-rich pulp that helps the jam set.
Plums
Add the main fruit flavor and bulk to the jam.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it set and keep.

Swap the plum

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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