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Dessert

Spiced Plums

A preserved plum dish made with sugar, vinegar, spices, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Spiced Plums

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining 1 pound of sugar with 1 pound of plums and ⅓ cup of vinegar.

  2. Add 1 ounce each of ground cinnamon, cloves, mace, and allspice for every peck of plums.

  3. Prick the plums and add them to the syrup.

Steep and reduce

  1. Pour the boiling syrup over the plums and let them stand for three days.

  2. Skim the plums and boil down the syrup until thick.

Jar

  1. Pour the hot syrup over the plums in a jar and cover closely.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and, as it thickens into syrup, helps preserve the fruit.
Plums
Provide the fruit base, with flesh that softens and absorbs the spiced syrup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and sharpens the flavor of the syrup.
Ground cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavor to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil down the syrup until thick. Boiling concentrates the sugar, so the syrup thickens and holds more of the preserving power of sugar and acid. Stopping early leaves a thin syrup that may not keep well.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, plum, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, plum, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, allspice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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