Skip to main content
Drink

Plum Vinegar

A fermented plum juice sweetened with brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Plum Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Wash the plums and extract as much juice as possible by washing the pulp twice with warm water.

  2. Pour the juice into stone or glass vessels and set in a warm place for two days.

  3. Skim and decant the clear liquid.

Ferment and store

  1. For every 3 pints of juice, add 1 pint of brown sugar.

  2. Pour the mixture into jugs, cover with a cloth, and place in a dark area to ferment.

  3. Once sufficiently strong, cork the jugs and store for later use.

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

Well ripened plums
Provide the juice that ferments into the vinegar, along with their natural sugars and acids.
Brown sugar
Feeds the fermentation, producing the acidity that turns the plum juice into vinegar.

The step that matters

Covering the jugs and fermenting in a dark area. A cloth cover lets air in while keeping dust and fruit flies out, which allows the acetic acid bacteria to work. Keeping it dark and sealed from contaminants helps the batch sour rather than spoil.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes