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To Preserve Fruit for Tarts, or Family-deserts

This preserves cherries, plums, and American apples in sugar for use in tarts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 404 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts, or Family-deserts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Place the fruit in small jars.

  3. Strew 6 ounces of sugar over each jar.

  4. Cover each jar with two tied bladders.

Cook and store

  1. Set the jars in a large pot of water up to the neck.

  2. Boil gently for 3 hours.

  3. Store the jars in a cool, dry 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 + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cherries
Provide the main fruit flavor and texture for the preserve.
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

Boil gently for 3 hours. Gentle heat slowly cooks the fruit and sealed jars without violent bubbling, which could break the bladders or let water into the jars. Sugar and sustained heat together help keep the fruit stable for storage.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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