Skip to main content
Dessert

Marmelade De Prunes. — Plum Marmalade.

A preserve made by boiling plums with water and sugar until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Marmelade De Prunes. — Plum Marmalade.

Ingredients

Directions

Make the plum pulp

  1. Stone the plums and boil them with a little water until reduced to a marmalade.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve and return it to the pot.

  3. Stir constantly while boiling until the marmalade almost adheres to the pot.

Make the syrup

  1. Weigh the marmalade and measure out an equal weight of sugar.

  2. In a separate pot, combine the sugar with ½ pint of water and boil, skimming well.

  3. Boil until the syrup snaps short between your fingers.

Combine and pot

  1. Add the marmalade to the syrup and stir over the heat until it begins to simmer.

  2. Let it cool, then transfer to pots and sprinkle a little fine sugar on top.

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 base, and their natural pectin helps the marmalade thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled into syrup, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it snaps short. Sugar syrup must reach a high enough concentration to set firmly when cooled. Underboiled syrup leaves the marmalade runny, while overboiling can make it hard and sticky.

“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.

More plum marmalade recipes

Imperatrice 9Wild 4 See all 23 →

You might also like

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