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Dessert

Preserved Fruits

A method of preserving plums by boiling in sugar syrup and drying them.

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 Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the syrup and add the plums, gently boiling them until clear.

  2. Let the plums cool in the syrup, then strain the syrup and add more sugar.

  3. Boil the plums again in the fresh syrup until clear and the syrup adheres.

Pot and dry

  1. Place the plums in small pots and pour the syrup over them.

  2. For drying, keep some syrup, boil it quickly, then give the fruit a warm bath before draining.

  3. Dry the plums on plates in a cool oven.

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 as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration, helps preserve it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Boiling the plums again in the fresh syrup until clear. Sugar must penetrate the fruit gradually. Boiling too hard or too briefly can break the skins or leave the plums undercooked, and the syrup must reach the right concentration to adhere and preserve the fruit.

“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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