Skip to main content
Dessert

Magnum Donum Plums

A preserve of plums cooked in sugar syrup until the fruit becomes clear yellow and adheres to the syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Magnum Donum Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Prick each plum with a larding pin.

  2. Simmer the plums in a thin syrup very gently for a few minutes.

  3. Transfer the plums to a bowl and let the syrup cool.

  4. Pour the cooled syrup over the plums and let them sit for about three days.

Make the jam

  1. Make a new syrup with 3 pounds of sugar and the cooled syrup, removing the plums first.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil and add the plums.

  3. Boil until the plums are a clear yellow and the syrup adheres to them.

  4. Place the plums in small pots and cover them with syrup.

Dry some plums

  1. To dry some plums, boil syrup a little longer and then give the fruit another boil.

  2. Drain the dried plums on a drying sieve.

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 gives the jam its flavour and body as they cook down.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, at high concentration, helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil until the plums are a clear yellow and the syrup adheres to them. Sugar concentration and boiling point must be high enough for the syrup to thicken and set on the fruit. Stopping too early leaves thin syrup that will not hold, while boiling too long can toughen the fruit and make it overly dense.

“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.

More plum jam recipes

Damson 6Apricot 5Black 4Green Gage 3Mirabelle 3 See all 63 →

You might also like

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes