Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Dried Plums

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

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 30 minutes.

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

  4. Adjust liquid and sugar as needed based on experience.

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
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender, moist fruit as they simmer.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the dried plums.
Claret or port wine
Adds depth of flavour and aroma while forming much of the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Cook until fully tender. Dried fruit softens slowly as hot liquid hydrates and breaks down its structure. The listed times are a guide, so keep cooking until the plums are tender, since undercooked plums stay firm and tough.

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

Plum Pudding SaucePlum Pudding Sauce24 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes