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Dessert

Magnum Bonum Plums

Preserved plums simmered in sugar syrup and stored in small pots.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Prick the plums with a needle to prevent bursting.

  2. Simmer them gently in a thin syrup until cold, then place in a bowl.

  3. Let the plums sit for three days.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. Make a syrup with 3 pounds of sugar and just enough water to dissolve it.

  2. Boil the plums in the fresh syrup until clear and the syrup adheres to them.

  3. Place the plums in small pots and pour the syrup over them.

Dry some plums

  1. To dry some plums, reserve a little syrup, boil it quickly, then warm the fruit in it, drain, and place on plates to dry in a cool oven.

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
The main fruit; pricking and resting let the syrup penetrate and keep the skins from bursting.
Sugar
Forms a concentrated syrup that preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness and body.

The step that matters

Boil the plums in the fresh syrup until clear. Boiling too briefly leaves the fruit cloudy and under-infused, while overboiling breaks the skins and softens the fruit. Sugar concentration and gentle heat let the syrup replace the fruit's water so it keeps well.

“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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