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Preserve

Modern Cookery

Whole plums are sugared, baked or steamed, left to stand in syrup, then stored in jars or bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

Modern Cookery

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a very cool oven”. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. Place the plums in a baking dish.

  3. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the plums without shaking it down.

Cook

  1. Bake in the cool oven for 4 to 5 hours.

  2. Alternatively, steam the plums gently for about 3 hours.

Rest and store

  1. Leave the plums in the syrup for a few days to absorb the sweetness.

  2. When ready to store, tie a bladder over the necks of jars or bottles.

  3. Secure the bladder with paper or cork.

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 flesh and flavor that the sugar sweetens and preserves.
Pounded sugar
Draws juice out of the fruit to form a syrup that sweetens and preserves it.

The step that matters

Sprinkling the sugar without shaking it down. Sugar draws water out of the fruit by osmosis, forming the syrup that preserves it. Shaking the sugar down would compact it and crush or bruise the plums, so the sugar should sit loosely over the fruit to dissolve evenly as it draws out juice.

“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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