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Damson Preserves

Preserves made from damson plums cooked with sugar and water.

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

Damson Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and wipe the plums.

  2. Prick each plum 5 or 6 times with a fork or large needle.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by boiling equal parts sugar and ½ cup water for each pound of sugar.

  2. Skim the syrup.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the plums a few at a time and cook until soft.

  2. Transfer the preserves to sterilized jars, cover them with syrup, and adjust the tops.

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

Damson plums
Provide the fruit flavor, plus natural pectin and acid that help the preserves set.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit, draws out moisture, and helps the preserves set and keep.

The step that matters

Add the plums a few at a time. Adding too many plums at once drops the syrup's temperature and slows the boil, so the fruit can stew unevenly instead of cooking through and setting properly.

“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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