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Dessert

Victoria Plum Preserve

A preserve made from plums, sugar, and water, boiled and cooled.

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 ↓

Victoria Plum Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Choose sound plums and leave their stalks on.

  2. Weigh the plums and take an equal quantity of sugar.

  3. Prick each plum in six or eight places with a new needle.

Make the preserve

  1. In a pot, combine the plums, sugar, and 1 pint of water for every pound of fruit.

  2. Bring to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and let the plums sit in a cool place for 24 hours.

  4. Boil the mixture again for about 30 minutes, stirring carefully to avoid breaking the fruit.

  5. Transfer the plums to pots and cover with paper wetted with paste.

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 forms the body and flavour of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Stirring carefully during the second boil. Plums soften as they cook and can break apart. Gentle stirring keeps the fruit whole, which gives a cleaner texture in the finished preserve.

“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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