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To Preserve Fruit for Tarts

A method of preserving ripe cherries, plums, or apples in sugar for use in tarts.

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 ↓

To Preserve Fruit for Tarts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the jars

  1. Gather ripe cherries, plums, or American apples.

  2. Place the fruit in small jars that hold 1 pound each.

  3. Sprinkle 6 oz of pounded sugar over each jar.

  4. Cover each jar with 2 tied bladders.

Boil and store

  1. Set the jars in a large pot of water up to the neck.

  2. Boil gently for 3 hours.

  3. Store the jars in a dry place.

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

Ripe cherries, plums, or american apples
Provides the fruit itself, supplying the flavor and juice that the preserve is built around.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in high concentration, helps preserve it by drawing out moisture.

The step that matters

Boil gently with the water at the jar necks. Gentle, sustained heat cooks the fruit through and dissolves the sugar evenly. Vigorous boiling can knock jars together or push water into them, and keeping the water level at the necks keeps the heat even across each jar.

“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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