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Dessert

Preserved Fruits

A marmalade made from plums, pears, and apples sweetened with sugar and rose-water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Preserved Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Split and stone the plums.

  2. Blanch the kernels and pound them with a little rose-water.

  3. Pare and core the pears and apples.

  4. Place them in a jar with a little sugar, but no water.

Bake and cook

  1. Bake the fruits in a cool oven.

  2. In a preserving pan, beat the baked fruits well, stir in the sugar, and boil for 1 hour.

  3. Put the marmalade into small deep dishes and dry it gently 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 + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

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

  2. Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

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

  4. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Plums
Provide the main fruit body and flavour for the marmalade.
Pears
Add soft pulp and mild sweetness to the fruit mass.
Apples
Contribute pectin and body that help the marmalade set.
Double-refined sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it and thicken it as it boils.

The step that matters

Boiling the baked fruit with the sugar for 1 hour. Sugar and long boiling concentrate the mixture and draw out water, so the marmalade thickens and keeps. Stopping too early leaves it loose and prone to spoiling, while overboiling can scorch it and darken the flavour.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, apple, sugar, rose. 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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