Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums sweetened with sugar and sealed in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and plum 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 Plums

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Macerate the plums

  1. Layer plums and sugar alternately in a stone jar.

  2. Place the jar in a moderately warm oven (350°F / 175°C) until the oven cools.

  3. If prepared at tea time, leave the jar until morning.

Make the syrup and jar

  1. Strain the juice from the plums.

  2. Boil and clarify the strained juice.

  3. Carefully transfer the fruit to glass or china jars.

  4. Pour the hot syrup over the fruit and cover tightly with egg, tissue paper, or thick white paper.

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. Sugar + plumtop 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 fruit being preserved, providing the main flavour and the body of the finished dish.
Sugar
Draws juice out of the fruit and forms a syrup that helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cover the jars tightly. Sealing the hot syrup and fruit from air limits the surface exposure where mould and spoilage microbes can grow. Sugar concentration in the syrup adds to preservation, but only a tight seal keeps the surface protected.

“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.

You might also like

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