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Sliced Orange Preserve

A preserve made by cooking sliced navel oranges in water and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Sliced Orange Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice Navel oranges into rounds ½ inch thick.

  2. Cover the slices with water and let them sit overnight.

Cook the oranges

  1. Cook the slices in the water until tender.

  2. Gently lift the slices out without breaking.

  3. Strain the water and make a heavy syrup by adding an equal amount of sugar.

  4. Cook the orange slices in the syrup until they are clear and transparent.

Jar

  1. Transfer the slices to dry, sterile jars, adjust the rubbers and lids, 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

Navel oranges
Provide the fruit and peel, which softens during simmering while the slices keep their shape.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, in a heavy syrup, replaces the water in the slices so they turn clear.

The step that matters

Cook the orange slices in the syrup until clear and transparent. Sugar must slowly replace the water inside the slices. Boiling too hard can break or toughen the rounds, while stopping too early leaves them cloudy and less preserved.

“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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