Name: Preserving Fruit with and Without Sugar
Ingredients: Cherries, stemmed; Strawberries, picked; Gooseberries; Currants, stemmed; Blueberries, picked; Pineapple, peeled and cut into small pieces; Sugar (to taste); Cold water

Why it works: Currant and pineapple work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 142 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Preserving Fruit with and Without Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bath

Place two square tinned copper vessels in the oven, one on the bottom shelf and one on the middle shelf.
Pour cold water about 1 inch deep into each vessel.

Fill the jars

Place the prepared fruit in glass jars.
Add a large quantity of sugar to the gooseberries, a little to the strawberries and cherries, and none to the currants and blueberries.
Fill the jars with cold water.
Place the jars in the tinned copper vessels, covering loosely.

Cook and seal

Cook in the oven overnight at about 200°F (93°C) without reaching boiling point.
Fill each jar with water just off the boiling point.
Seal the jars immediately.
Return the jars to the hot water in the pans to cool gradually.

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.

Currant + pineappletop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together142 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).
Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,841 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Sugar: Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit, with the amount varied by fruit.
Gooseberries: Provide the fruit base that is preserved with a large quantity of sugar.

The step that matters

Cooking below boiling point overnight. If the water reaches a boil, the fruit softens and breaks down, and the jars can crack or lose their seal. Holding the temperature gently near 200°F keeps the fruit intact while it slowly heats through and the jars seal.