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Dessert

Canned Plum Jelly

A simple jelly made from canned greengage plum juice, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Canned Plum Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain half of the juice from the can of plums.

Make the jelly

  1. In a saucepan, combine the juice with sugar and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Stir until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Add the juice of half a lemon and mix well.

  4. Quickly pour the mixture into tumblers.

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 + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together623 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Plum + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,313 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Canned greengage plum juice
Provides the fruit flavour and the liquid that the sugar dissolves into.
Sugar
Sweetens the jelly and helps it set as it boils.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Quickly pour the mixture into tumblers. The jelly thickens as it cools, so delaying the pour can leave it too stiff to fill containers evenly. Pouring promptly while it is still fluid keeps the texture smooth and even.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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