Skip to main content
Dessert

Glazed and Candied Fruits

A preserved fruit dish made by blanching fruit, then steeping in sugar syrup, and storing in jars with spirit-soaked paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Apricot and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 218 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Glazed and Candied Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Prepare a syrup with sugar and water, heating until it reaches 28° on the saccharometer.

  2. Blanch the fruit until soft to allow sugar penetration.

Candy the fruit

  1. Concentrate the syrup to 32° the next day, adding the fruit and letting it stand for 2 days.

  2. Heat the syrup to 38°, adding more syrup and boiling with the fruit.

Jar and seal

  1. Place the hot mixture in dry jars, cover with spirit-soaked paper, 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. Apricot + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + spirittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together38 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Sugar + peartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Sugar + apricottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 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

Sugar
Forms a concentrated syrup that penetrates the fruit and preserves it.
Raw fruit
Provides the main material that absorbs the syrup and becomes candied.

The step that matters

Concentrating the syrup in stages. Raising the syrup concentration gradually lets sugar move into the fruit without drawing out too much water, which would shrivel it. Jumping straight to a high concentration can leave the fruit tough or dried out.

Swap the pear

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Pearthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, apricot, spirit. 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.

You might also like

Apricot Ice CreamApricot Ice Cream26 recipesMixed Fruit SherbetMixed Fruit Sherbet6 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes