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Dessert

Preserved Egg Plums

A sweet preserve of plums cooked in sugar syrup and stored in jars.

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

  1. Wash the plums.

  2. Dry the plums.

  3. Combine sugar and enough water to dissolve the sugar in a preserving kettle.

  4. Heat the mixture on low until it is simmering.

  5. Prick each plum with a needle or fork.

Cook in layers

  1. Add a layer of plums to the syrup.

  2. Cook the layer until the plums lose color and the skins begin to break.

  3. Remove the plums with a skimmer.

  4. Place the plums in a large dish to cool.

  5. Repeat with the remaining plums.

  6. Cook and cool each new layer.

  7. Carefully replace any broken skins to maintain appearance.

  8. Return the first layer to the kettle.

  9. Boil until the syrup is transparent.

Jar and seal

  1. While the last layer cools, place the first layer in glass jars.

  2. Pour hot syrup over the plums in the jars.

  3. Allow the jars to cool.

  4. 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

Plums
Provide the fruit, whose pricked skins let the syrup penetrate and whose flesh softens as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves it.

The step that matters

Cook each layer until the skins just begin to break. Cooking too briefly leaves the flesh firm and slows syrup uptake, while overcooking makes the skins split and the plums mushy and pale, which spoils their appearance.

“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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