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 ↓
Canned Plums
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup and plums
Make a syrup by boiling 1 quart of water with 4 cups of sugar.
Once boiling, add plums until the bottom of the preserving kettle is covered.
When the skins crack, remove the plums one by one with a silver spoon and place them carefully in a glass jar.
Fill and seal
When the jar is nearly full, fill it with the boiling syrup and seal immediately.
Warm the jar before filling.
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.
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Sugar + plumtop 21% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Sweetens the fruit and, in the syrup, helps preserve the plums and adds body to the liquid.
- Plums
- Provide the main fruit flavor, and their skins crack and flesh softens as they heat in the syrup.
The step that matters
Warming the jar before filling. Pouring boiling syrup into a cold glass jar can cause thermal shock and crack the glass. Warming the jar first reduces the temperature difference, so it is less likely to break.
“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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