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Dessert

Orange Preserve.— I

A preserve made from peeled oranges, salt, water, and sugar, cooked until the fruit is clear and syrup thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Preserve.— I

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel the yellow rind off the oranges thinly and rub with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let sit for 30 minutes.

  3. Pour boiling water over the oranges.

  4. Let the oranges cool.

  5. Make incisions in each orange and remove the seeds.

  6. Soak the oranges in fresh water overnight.

Cook and preserve

  1. The next day, cook the oranges in fresh water for about 15 minutes.

  2. Remove the oranges from the water.

  3. Place them in boiling syrup made with equal weight of sugar and fruit, using 2 cups of water for every cup of sugar.

  4. Cook for 3 to 4 hours until the fruit is clear and the syrup is thick.

  5. Fill into dry, sterile jars and seal tightly.

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

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 flesh become the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, in the thick syrup, helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Cooking in the syrup for 3 to 4 hours. Cooking long and slowly lets the sugar syrup gradually replace the water in the fruit, making it clear and translucent. Too little time leaves it cloudy, while overheating can darken or toughen it.

“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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