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A Pine Preserve of the Green Orange Plum

A preserve made from green orange plums and powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

A Pine Preserve of the Green Orange Plum

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Remove the stalks from the plums and weigh them.

  2. Gash the plums with a silver knife and place them in a preserving pan.

  3. Stir gently over moderate heat until they release enough juice to prevent burning.

  4. Boil quickly until the stones detach from the flesh.

  5. Remove the stones as they float to the surface.

Make the preserve

  1. Once smooth and well reduced, stir in the powdered sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture quickly for 30 to 50 minutes.

  3. Pour into small molds or pans and let cool until firm.

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. Orange + plumtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 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).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Green orange plums
Provide the fruit body, pectin and tartness that form the preserve's structure and flavor.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as it concentrates through boiling, helps it set firm.

The step that matters

Stirring before the juice releases. Stirring gently over moderate heat until the plums release enough juice prevents scorching on the base of the pan. Fruit that sticks and burns will taste bitter and dark, so the pan must have enough liquid before the heat rises.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, 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.

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