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Dessert

Magnum-Bonum Plums

A plum preserve made by boiling plums with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Magnum-Bonum Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour boiling water over the plums and let them sit until the skins peel off.

  2. Weigh the fruit and use an equal weight of sugar.

  3. Add 1 cup of water for every 4 pounds of sugar.

Cook the jam

  1. Stir until dissolved.

  2. Boil the mixture until clear.

  3. Add the plums.

  4. Boil gently for 30 minutes.

  5. Remove the stones.

  6. Pour the mixture into sweetmeat pots.

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, pectin and tartness that give the jam its flavor and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam, helps it set and preserves it by binding water.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 30 minutes. Sugar must dissolve fully before the fruit is added, and the mixture needs enough heat to reach setting point. Boiling too hard or too briefly can leave the jam runny or cause it to scorch on the bottom of the pan.

“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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