Name: Stewed Fruit
Ingredients: 1 pint plums or any other seasonable fruit; 2 oz brown sugar; 1 pint water

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 ↓

Stewed Fruit

Ingredients

1 pint plums or any other seasonable fruit
2 oz brown sugar
1 pint water

Directions

Boil the water and sugar until syrupy, about 15 minutes.
Add the fruit and simmer until tender.
Let cool before serving.

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.

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: The main fruit softens as it simmers and takes on the sweet syrup.
Brown sugar: Dissolves in the water to make a sweet syrup that flavors 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.