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Dessert

Fruit Leather

Fruit leather is a dried fruit spread made by mashing fruit, concentrating juice, spreading on oiled platters, and drying in sun or dryer.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Leather

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mash the ripe fruit to a pulp.

Cook and spread

  1. Heat the pulp slowly to concentrate the juice slightly.

  2. Spread the mixture on lightly oiled platters.

Dry and store

  1. Dry the platters in the sun or a food dryer until fully dry.

  2. Pack the dried fruit leather in jars or tightly sealed boxes lined with wax paper.

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. Apricot + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Apricot + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together284 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Fig + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Fig + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together45 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe fruit
Provides the flavor, natural sugars and pectin that let the pulp set into a sheet.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the leather hold its texture; optional in this recipe.

The step that matters

Drying until fully dry. Leather that stays damp can mold or spoil in storage. Drying removes water until the sheet is firm and no longer tacky, which is what makes it keep.

Swap the fig

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, peach, plum, sugar):

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figthe original
  4. Applefits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, peach, plum, 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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