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Dessert

Preserved Egg Plums

Plums preserved in a sugar syrup until translucent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Preserved Egg Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Wash and dry the plums.

  2. Place sugar in a preserving kettle with enough water to dissolve it. Heat slowly.

  3. Prick each plum with a needle or fork.

Cook the plums

  1. Add a layer of plums to the syrup. Cook until they lose color and the skins begin to break.

  2. Remove plums with a skimmer and place them in a large dish to cool.

  3. Repeat with remaining plums, carefully replacing broken skins.

  4. Return the first layer to the kettle and boil until transparent.

Jar and seal

  1. Place cooled plums in glass jars and pour hot syrup over them.

  2. Seal jars when cool.

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

Plums
Provide the fruit that is cooked, softened and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup to sweeten the fruit and help preserve it.

The step that matters

Cook until the skins begin to break, without overcooking. Pricking and gentle heat let syrup penetrate the fruit evenly. Overcooking breaks the skins and turns the plums mushy, while undercooking leaves them firm and under-infused.

“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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