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Dessert

Preserved Egg Plums

Preserved plums are cooked in a sugar syrup and jarred.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and plum 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 ↓

Preserved Egg Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Wash and dry the plums.

  2. In a preserving kettle, combine the sugar with enough water to dissolve it and heat over low heat until simmering.

  3. Prick each plum with a needle or a fork with fine prongs.

Cook the plums

  1. Place a layer of plums in the syrup and cook until they lose color and the skins begin to break.

  2. Remove the plums with a perforated skimmer and place them on a large dish to cool.

  3. Repeat the cooking and cooling process with additional layers of plums.

  4. Carefully replace any broken skins to maintain appearance.

  5. Once all layers are cooked, return the first layer to the kettle and boil until transparent.

Jar and seal

  1. Transfer the cooked plums to glass jars and pour the hot syrup over them.

  2. Allow to cool, then seal the jars.

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. Sugar + plumtop 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup that preserves the plums and gives them sweetness.
Plums
Provide the fruit that is cooked in the syrup and becomes the preserved product.

The step that matters

Cooking the plums in layers until they lose color and the skins begin to break. Cooking in small batches in a syrup that is kept gently simmering lets the fruit soften and become transparent without bursting. Overcooking or boiling too hard breaks the skins and makes the plums fall apart.

“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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