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Dessert

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts, or Family Desserts

This recipe preserves ripe cherries, plums, or American apples in jars with sugar for later use in tarts or desserts.

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 ↓

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts, or Family Desserts

Ingredients

Directions

Fill the jars

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

  2. Place them in small jars that hold 1 pound each.

  3. Sprinkle 6 ounces of pounded sugar over the fruit in each jar.

Cover and heat

  1. Cover each jar with 2 bladders, tied down separately.

  2. Set the jars in a large pot of water up to the neck and heat.

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

Cherries, plums, or american apples
Supply the fruit, flavor and body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Set the jars in the water bath and heat. Heating the jars gently in water cooks the fruit evenly and drives out air, helping it keep. The water should reach the necks of the jars without flooding them, so the covers stay sealed and the contents stay clean.

“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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