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Dessert

Greengage Jam, or Marmalade

A jam made from greengages boiled with sugar.

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 ↓

Greengage Jam, or Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the skins and stones from the ripe greengages.

Cook

  1. Boil the greengages quickly without sugar for 50 minutes, stirring well.

  2. Add 4½ lbs of powdered sugar to the greengages and boil for an additional 5 to 8 minutes.

Finish

  1. Skim off any scum before pouring the jam into jars.

  2. If the flesh does not separate easily from the stones, boil the whole greengages to a pulp, then pass through a sieve.

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

Greengages
Provide the fruit flesh, natural pectin and acidity that give the marmalade its body and set.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps the mixture thicken and set while preserving it.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar and boiling briefly. Sugar must be stirred in fully, then the mixture boiled for only a few minutes. This lets pectin and acid gel into a set. Boiling too long darkens the colour and dulls the flavour.

“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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