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Dessert

Peach Marmalade

A preserve made from peaches, sugar, lemon juice, and water, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare, stone, and weigh the peaches.

Make the marmalade

  1. Heat the peaches slowly to draw out the juice, stirring often with a wooden spoon.

  2. Once hot, boil quickly for 30 minutes, stirring continuously.

  3. Add sugar, boiling for an additional 5 minutes while removing any scum.

  4. Stir in lemon juice and the water from boiling the peach kernels.

  5. Stew all together for 10 minutes, stirring until smooth.

Finish and store

  1. Transfer the hot marmalade into air-tight cans or cool jars, covering with brandied tissue 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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Peaches
Provide the fruit pulp, flavour and body of the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and keep as a preserve.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Boiling quickly after the fruit is hot. Vigorous boiling with constant stirring drives off water so the mixture thickens, and it prevents scorching on the base of the pan. If the boil is too gentle, the marmalade stays runny and may spoil sooner.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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