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Heavenly Hash

A fruit hash made with plums, sugar, oranges, and raisins, simmered together.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Heavenly Hash

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the pulp of the oranges for 30 minutes.

  2. Cut the orange peel into small pieces.

  3. Combine all ingredients and cook together for 2 hours.

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 + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together309 recipes

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

  2. Orange + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Plum + raisintop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 fruit base and bulk of the preserve, softening into a thick mass as they cook.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the preserve as it cooks down.
Oranges
Add acidity and bitter aromatic peel that give the preserve a bright, complex flavour.
Seedless raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and chewy texture to the finished preserve.

The step that matters

Combine all ingredients and cook together for 2 hours. Long, gentle cooking lets the sugar dissolve and the fruit break down and thicken. Stirring prevents scorching on the bottom of the pot, since sugar-rich mixtures burn easily.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, orange, raisin):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, raisin. 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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