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Dessert

Orange Preserves

Preserved oranges soaked in sugar syrup, optionally flavored with lemons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel a thin rind off the oranges.

  2. Make a hole in each end of the oranges to remove all the seeds.

  3. Pour boiling water over the oranges.

  4. Let the oranges stand until the next morning.

  5. If the water tastes bitter, check for any remaining seeds. If bitter, pour boiling water over them daily until the bitterness is gone.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the oranges until they are soft enough to run a straw through them.

  2. For every pound of fruit, add 1½ pounds of sugar.

  3. Make a thin syrup with half the sugar.

  4. Boil the oranges in the syrup for a short time.

  5. Let the oranges stand in the syrup for three days.

Finish the syrup

  1. After three days, pour the syrup from the fruit.

  2. Add the remaining sugar.

  3. Boil it down until thick.

  4. Pour the thick syrup over the fruit.

  5. Optionally, add a few lemons for extra flavor.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Oranges
Provide the main fruit, whose peel and pulp soften and turn tender during boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled into syrup, preserves it and gives it a thick, glossy texture.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and bright flavor to the preserve.

The step that matters

Removing the bitterness by daily soaking. Bitter compounds from the peel and remaining seeds leach into the water, so the fruit must be soaked in fresh boiling water until the bitterness is gone before sugar is added. Sugar added too early locks in the bitter taste.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. 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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