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Dessert

Preserved Plums

Preserved plums are plums boiled in syrup until soaked and then packed in jars with thickened syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and syrup work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 143 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Preserved Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Prepare a syrup for preserves and bring it to a boil, skimming off any foam.

Cook the plums

  1. Prick each plum with a coarse needle and drop them into the boiling syrup a few at a time.

  2. Boil the plums gently in the syrup for 20 minutes or until thoroughly soaked.

  3. Remove the plums with a skimmer and pack them tightly into jars.

  4. Boil the syrup for an additional 20 minutes or until thickened.

Jar and finish

  1. Fill the jars with the thick syrup to the top and let them cool.

  2. Finish the next day as directed for Peaches Preserved in Syrup.

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 + syruptop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together143 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provide the fruit that is softened and preserved in the sugar syrup.
Syrup
Sweetens the fruit and, once thickened, coats and preserves it in the jars.

The step that matters

Boil the plums gently in the syrup. Gentle simmering lets the syrup penetrate the fruit evenly without bursting the skins or turning the plums mushy. Vigorous boiling breaks the fruit apart and makes the preserves cloudy and uneven.

“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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