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Stewed Plums

Stewed plums with sugar and red currant juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and red currant work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Stewed Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, halve, and stone the plums.

  2. Place the plums in a saucepan with cold water and add the sugar.

Cook and serve

  1. Bring to a boil, skim the surface, and cook for 5 minutes, stirring gently to avoid mashing the fruit.

  2. Remove from heat and stir in the red currant juice for about 30 seconds.

  3. Pour the fruit into a bowl, let it cool, then turn it out onto a dish and serve.

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 + red curranttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the main fruit body and flavour that the stewed dish is built around.
Granulated sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the fruit hold a syrupy, rounded flavour as it cooks.
Red currant juice
Adds tartness and a bright acidity that balances the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Stirring gently during the 5-minute cook. Vigorous stirring breaks down the soft plum flesh into mush, so the halves stay whole and hold their shape while the syrup forms.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against plum, 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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