Skip to main content
Dessert

Plum Jam

A jam made by cooking plums with sugar and water, removing pits, and simmering for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Plum Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Put slightly broken plums in a pot over medium heat without any sugar.

  2. Place the pot in a kettle of boiling water.

  3. Remove the pot from heat.

  4. Take out all the pits from the plums.

  5. Break the pits with a hammer.

  6. Tie the broken shells in a piece of old muslin.

Cook the jam

  1. Return the fruit to the heat.

  2. Add sugar.

  3. Drop the bag of shells into the pot.

  4. Simmer for one hour.

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 flesh, flavor, and natural pectin that helps the jam thicken.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it set by binding water and thickening the mixture.

The step that matters

Drop the bag of shells into the pot. Plum pits and shells contain pectin, a natural gelling agent. Simmering them in muslin releases pectin into the jam, helping it set without being mixed into the fruit.

“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 jam recipes

Damson 6Apricot 5Black 4Green Gage 3Mirabelle 3 See all 63 →

You might also like

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