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Wild Plum Marmalade

A preserve made from wild plum juice and sugar, boiled until thick.

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 ↓

Wild Plum Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Strain the juice and pulp of the wild plums through a wire sieve.

  2. Add an equal amount of sugar to the strained pulp.

  3. Boil the mixture well, stirring constantly to prevent burning.

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

Wild plums
Provide the fruit pulp and natural pectin that give the marmalade its body and set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the mixture thicken and preserve the fruit when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture well, stirring constantly. Sugar-rich fruit mixtures scorch easily on the bottom of the pan, and burnt flavour spreads through the whole batch. Constant stirring keeps the sugar and pulp moving, while a full boil lets the mixture reach the concentration needed to set.

“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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