What spices go with plum

Q: What spices go with plum?

Shiso, Star anise, Coriander seed, Cassia. Red shiso and ume is one of the fixed pairings of Japanese food: the leaves are salted and packed with the plums, where the fruit acid turns their anthocyanins bright red and the leaves in turn perfume the umeboshi. It is a pairing where each ingredient changes the other, which is rare.

Quick answer

Shiso, Star anise, Coriander seed, Cassia — in roughly that order of how well established each combination is.

Each is explained below, with the cuisines it belongs to and the point at which it stops working.

Why plum behaves as it does

Plum has more acid than most stone fruit, and that is why it works in savoury cooking where peach and apricot mostly do not: Georgian tkemali, Chinese plum sauce and Japanese umeboshi are all built on sourness rather than sweetness. The spicing follows the intended direction. Sweet: cassia, star anise and clove, all of which stand up to long cooking with sugar. Savoury: coriander, blue fenugreek, garlic and chilli, which is the tkemali formula. Prunes concentrate both sugar and acid and take heavier spicing than fresh plums.

Culinary conventionA consistent pattern across Georgian, Chinese and Japanese plum preparations.

Classic

Long-established in at least one cuisine — the combinations you can rely on.

Shiso

Classic

Red shiso and ume is one of the fixed pairings of Japanese food: the leaves are salted and packed with the plums, where the fruit acid turns their anthocyanins bright red and the leaves in turn perfume the umeboshi. It is a pairing where each ingredient changes the other, which is rare.

How: Salted red shiso packed with umeboshi; As yukari, the dried purple furikake made from the leaves afterwards

Red shiso rather than green; the two are used for entirely different purposes

Documented in cuisineJapaneseEstablished culinary practice

Strong

Star anise

Strong

Anethole and plum acidity is a combination Chinese cooking arrived at long before European cooking did, and it survives long cooking with sugar better than most aromatics. Star anise in a plum sauce or a poaching syrup gives depth that cinnamon alone does not.

How: In a poaching syrup; In Chinese plum sauce

Documented in cuisineChineseFrenchEstablished culinary practice

Coriander seed

Strong

The Georgian direction, and the one most cooks have never met. Tkemali is a sour plum sauce seasoned with coriander, blue fenugreek and garlic and eaten with meat — savoury rather than sweet, and built on the plum's acid rather than its sugar.

How: In tkemali, with garlic and blue fenugreek

Documented in cuisineGeorgianEstablished culinary practice

Good

Cassia

Good

The sweet treatment, and cassia rather than Ceylon cinnamon because it holds up to long cooking with sugar. A plum crumble or compote seasoned with Ceylon cinnamon tastes noticeably fainter.

How: In a compote or crumble

Culinary conventionBritishAmericanEstablished culinary practice

Cuts and forms

Dessert plum, Damson, Greengage, Dried (prune). These do not all take the same spicing — the notes above flag where the difference matters.

All pairing pages