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Dessert

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts

Preserves cherries, plums, and apples in jars with sugar by boiling in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Gather ripe cherries, plums, and American apples.

  2. Place fruit in small jars, adding 6 ounces of sugar to each jar.

  3. Cover jars with two tied bladders.

Cook and store

  1. Set jars in a large stewpan of water up to the neck and boil gently for 3 hours.

  2. Keep jars free from damp.

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 + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

  3. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

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

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

  5. Sugar + apricottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Ripe cherries
Provide the main fruit flavour and texture for the preserve.
Ripe plums
Add fruit body and tartness to the preserved filling.
American apples
Contribute pectin and body that help the fruit hold together.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Keep the water gently boiling around the jars. A gentle boil cooks the fruit evenly through the jar without forcing water inside. A hard boil can crack jars or agitate the contents, so the fruit may cook unevenly.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Peachfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, sugar, apricot. 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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