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Dessert

Crystallised Plums

A preserved plum dish made by boiling plums, then cooking them in a sugar syrup and storing them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Crystallised Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Prick holes in the plums and place them in a pot with enough water to cover.

  2. Bring the water to a boil, then remove the plums and pour off the water.

Make the syrup

  1. Return the plums to the pot and cover them with syrup made from 1 lb of sugar mixed with 1 cup of water.

  2. Boil gently for 15-20 minutes, skimming constantly.

  3. Remove from heat and let the plums sit in the syrup for about 12 hours.

  4. Add more sugar boiled to the crack to the syrup, then pour it with the plums into large jars.

Store and dry

  1. Store the jars in a cold cellar for a couple of days.

  2. Remove the plums from the syrup, sprinkle with caster sugar, and dry them in a warm place.

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 softens in syrup and takes up sugar as it preserves.
Loaf sugar
Makes the syrup that draws water out of the fruit and gives sweetness and preservation.
Caster sugar
Coats the dried plums with a sweet, dry sugar surface.

The step that matters

Boil the added sugar to the crack stage. Sugar must reach a high concentration to draw water out of the fruit and help preserve it. Syrup that is too weak leaves the plums wet and more likely to spoil.

“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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