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Dessert

Damson Jam

A jam made from ripe damson plums and brown sugar, cooked and stored in stone jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Damson Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Fill a stone jar with fine ripe damson plums.

  2. Cover the jar and set it in a kettle of boiling water.

  3. Cook until the stones separate from the pulp.

  4. Pour the contents into a broad bowl or pan.

  5. Cool the mixture.

  6. Pick out the stones.

  7. Mash the pulp until smooth.

Make the jam

  1. Add 1½ pounds of brown sugar to 1 quart of pulp.

  2. Boil slowly in a porcelain-lined kettle for an hour or more.

  3. Skim the surface.

Jar and seal

  1. Fill small, wide-mouthed stone jars.

  2. Keep the jars uncovered in a cool, dark place for two days.

  3. Cover the jars with paraffin.

  4. Fit a paper cap on the jars with egg white.

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

Damson plums
Provide the fruit pulp and natural pectin that set the jam.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the jam and helps it thicken as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for an hour or more. Sugar and fruit must cook long enough for the mixture to reach the concentration needed to gel. Slow boiling in a wide, porcelain-lined kettle reduces the water and limits scorching on the bottom, which would give a burnt taste.

“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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