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Preserve

Orange Preserves

Preserved oranges cooked with sugar and optional lemon, simmered until syrup thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Peel a thin rind off the oranges and make a hole in each end to remove all seeds.

  2. Pour boiling water over the oranges and let them stand overnight.

  3. If the water tastes bitter, check for any remaining seeds and repeat pouring boiling water daily until the bitterness is gone.

Cook and syrup

  1. Boil the oranges until they are soft enough to run a straw through them.

  2. For every pound of oranges, add 1½ pounds of sugar.

  3. Make a thin syrup with half the sugar and boil the oranges in it for a short time.

  4. Let the oranges sit in the syrup for three days.

Finish the preserves

  1. After three days, pour the syrup from the fruit, add the remaining sugar, and boil it down until thick.

  2. Pour the thick syrup over the fruit. Adding a few lemons improves the flavor.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Oranges
Provide the fruit, whose pectin and pith soften during boiling to set the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled down, thickens the syrup and preserves the fruit.

The step that matters

Removing the bitterness by repeated soaking. Bitterness comes from compounds in the white pith and seeds. If seeds remain or soaking is cut short, the preserve stays bitter, so the water is checked and changed daily until it no longer tastes bitter.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, 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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