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Dessert

Orange Preserves

A preserve made by boiling oranges in sugar syrup, then storing them in the syrup.

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 the oranges, removing all seeds and tough skin.

  2. Pour boiling water over the oranges.

  3. Let the oranges sit overnight.

  4. Check for seeds if the water tastes bitter.

  5. Repeat pouring boiling water daily until bitterness is gone.

Make the syrup

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

  2. Make a thin syrup with half the sugar.

  3. Boil the oranges in the syrup for a short time.

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

Finish and thicken

  1. Remove the syrup from the fruit.

  2. Add the remaining sugar.

  3. Boil the mixture down thick.

  4. Pour the thick syrup over the fruit.

  5. Include a few sliced lemons for added 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 bitter compounds leach out during repeated soaking in water.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled down, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Lemons
Add tart acidity and bright flavor to the preserves.

The step that matters

Soaking until the bitterness is gone. Bitter compounds from the peel and pith dissolve slowly into the water with each soak. If the soaking stops too early, the bitterness stays in the fruit and carries into the finished preserves, so the cook should taste the water and repeat the soak 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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