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Preserving Fruit and Vegetables By Scalding

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 284 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserving Fruit and Vegetables By Scalding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 170°F (77°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

  1. Carefully pick the fruit and fill the stone bottles.

  2. Place the bottles in a large kettle and fill with cold water up to the mouths of the bottles.

  3. Prepare corks to fit the bottles and place a cloth under the bottles to prevent breaking.

  4. Heat the water to 170°F (77°C) and maintain this temperature for 30 minutes to scald the fruit.

  5. After scalding, fill the bottles with boiling water to within 1 inch of the cork and seal tightly.

  6. Store the bottles on their sides and turn them once or twice a week for the first month to prevent fermentation.

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

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Plum + rhubarbtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together40 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Currant + plumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together255 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Apricot + rhubarbtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together26 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  5. Apricot + curranttop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together188 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

Swap the currant

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Peachfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, plum, rhubarb. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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