Skip to main content
Dessert

Stewed Dried Plums

A sweet stew of dried plums cooked with water, wine, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Plum and port wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 32 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Stewed Dried Plums

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine dried plums, water, and wine in a pot.

  2. Simmer for 1½ hours.

  3. Add sugar and continue to cook for 1 hour or more until plums are tender.

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 + port winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Port wine + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Dried plums
Provide the main fruit body and sweetness that softens as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the cooked plums their rich, syrupy flavour.
Light claret or port wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar after the long simmer. Sugar added before the plums have softened can slow their tenderising, so the sugar is kept until after the simmer.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Figfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, sugar. 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.

You might also like

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