Name: Pbesbbvb of the Magnum Bokum, or Mogul Plum
Ingredients: 6 lbs Mogul plums, skinned and stoned; 3 lbs granulated sugar

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 ↓

Pbesbbvb of the Magnum Bokum, or Mogul Plum

Ingredients

6 lbs Mogul plums, skinned and stoned
3 lbs granulated sugar

Directions

Prepare and weigh the plums, then boil them for 40 minutes.
Stir in half their weight of granulated sugar and continue boiling for 10 more minutes, skimming the preserve carefully.
For a richer marmalade, increase the sugar amount.
To improve flavor, add blanched kernels from the fruit stones 2-3 minutes before removing from heat.
If the plums are not fully ripe, boil them down and press through a sieve.

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.

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

Mogul plums: Provide the fruit flavour, body and natural pectin that help the preserve set.
Granulated sugar: Sweetens the preserve, thickens it and helps it keep.

“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.