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To Dry Plums and Small Fruits

A method for drying plums and small fruits using sugar and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 655 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyl acetate, which smells fruit. The science ↓

To Dry Plums and Small Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pit the fruit and layer it in jars with sugar, using ½ pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  2. Let the jars sit for 24 hours.

Cook and dry

  1. Boil the fruit for 10 minutes, skimming off any scum that rises.

  2. Remove the fruit from the syrup and drain it.

  3. Spread the fruit thinly on dishes or hair sieves to dry in the sun, turning every few hours until dry.

Use the syrup

  1. Use the leftover syrup for pickling by mixing it with 1 large pint of vinegar for every small quart.

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 + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  2. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. 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

Fruit
Provides the base that dries down into the chewy, concentrated texture of dried plums.
Sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and adds sweetness, helping to preserve it.

The step that matters

Drying the fruit thinly and turning it. Spreading the fruit in a thin layer and turning it every few hours lets air reach all surfaces, so it dries evenly instead of staying moist in the middle or going moldy.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Pineapplefits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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