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Dessert

Preserved Golden Pippins

A preserved fruit made by boiling golden pippins with sugar, orange peel, lemon juice, and water into a syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Preserved Golden Pippins

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the apples

  1. Pare, core and quarter the golden pippins.

  2. Boil the quartered golden pippins with water until they become a pulp.

  3. Pass the pulp through a jelly bag.

  4. Boil the rind of the Seville orange in plenty of water until soft, then slice it.

  5. Add the sliced orange rind to the apple pulp.

  6. Peel and core the 12 choice pippins.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 2 lbs of loaf sugar with a little water.

  2. Skim the boiling sugar mixture.

  3. Add the 12 choice pippins to the sugar mixture.

  4. Boil until the sugar is almost candy-like.

  5. Add the jelly and orange peel to the mixture.

  6. Squeeze in the lemon juice.

  7. Simmer until the syrup looks clear.

  8. Pour the syrup into a mold or pots to keep.

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

Golden pippins
Provide the bulk of the fruit and pectin-rich pulp that sets the preserve.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, when boiled, thickens it into a clear syrup.
Seville orange
Its rind adds bitter aroma and extra pectin to help the preserve set.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports pectin setting.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar to the right stage. Sugar must be boiled long enough to reach a near-candy concentration so the mixture sets when cooled. Under-boiling leaves a runny preserve, while over-boiling makes it hard and sticky.

“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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