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Lemons Preserved

Lemons preserved by salting, boiling, and storing in syrup with sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Lemons Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Thinly peel the yellow rind off the lemons and remove the blossom end, pulps, and seeds.

  2. Rub the lemons with coarse sea salt and immerse them in cold water for 5 to 6 days.

  3. Boil the lemons in fresh saltwater for 20 minutes.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Prepare a syrup with 1 pound loaf sugar and 1 quart water, skimming it well.

  2. Add the lemons to the syrup and boil for 5 to 6 minutes each day for 4 consecutive days.

  3. Place the lemons in a jar, ensuring they are completely covered by the syrup, and let them sit for 6 weeks.

  4. Make a thick syrup with refined sugar and water, then gently boil the lemons in it for 10 minutes.

  5. Set the lemons aside and boil them again at short intervals until they look plump and clear.

Store and seal

  1. Transfer the lemons to jars or glasses and pour the cold syrup over them.

  2. Cover with brandy paper and seal with bladder and leather.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons
Provide the rind and flesh that soften and become preserved in the salt and syrup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and helps the rind soften and preserve the fruit.
Loaf sugar
Forms a syrup that preserves the lemons and gives them sweetness.

The step that matters

Keeping the lemons fully submerged in syrup. Any lemon exposed to air can mold or spoil during the long resting period. Sugar syrup at high concentration inhibits microbes, so the lemons must stay covered throughout the 6 weeks.

“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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