Skip to main content
Dessert

Canned Plums and Gages

Preserves plums in a sugar syrup by canning them.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Canned Plums and Gages

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plums

  1. Wash the plums.

  2. Prick the skins with a needle.

  3. Remove the skins by plunging them into boiling water until loosened.

  4. Peel the skins off with a sharp knife.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Boil until the sugar dissolves.

  3. Allow the syrup to cool.

Pack and process

  1. Pack the plums into jars.

  2. Cover the plums with the cooled syrup.

  3. Loosely place the jar covers on the jars.

  4. Arrange the jars on a rack in a kettle or boiler.

  5. Surround the jars with water up to the neck of the jars.

  6. Heat the water to a boiling point.

  7. Boil for thirty minutes.

  8. Remove the jars from the kettle.

  9. Screw the tops on securely.

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

Plums
Provide the fruit that is softened and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil the jars in water for thirty minutes. The jars must be fully surrounded by boiling water for the full time so the contents reach a temperature high enough to keep the sealed jars safe from spoilage organisms. Shortening the time or letting the water drop below boiling can leave the fruit under-processed.

“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

Mixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes