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Dessert

Preserved Magnum Bonum Plums

Preserved plums are plums soaked in a sugar syrup and simmered until tender.

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, then cover until cold.

  2. Remove the skins from the plums.

Syrup and soak

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

  2. Place the plums in a deep jar and pour the boiling syrup over them.

  3. Let the plums stand for 24 hours.

  4. Pour the syrup back into the pan and boil for a few minutes.

  5. Pour over the plums again and let them stand for another 24 hours.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil the syrup again, then add the plums.

  2. Simmer for 20-30 minutes until clear and tender.

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

  4. Boil the syrup until thick, about 10 more minutes, then pour 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
Provide the fruit, which softens and turns clear during the cooking in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as the syrup thickens, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Simmer until clear and tender. Simmering gently softens the fruit and lets it absorb syrup. Boiling hard can break the plums apart before they are tender and 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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