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Preserve

Preserves and Marmalades

A method for making fruit preserves by boiling fruit and combining it with a sugar‑water syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Plum and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Preserves and Marmalades

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining 1½ pounds of sugar with 1 pound of water.

  2. The syrup volume should be 1½ times that of the fruit.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the fruit according to the following times: cherries 5 minutes, raspberries 6 minutes, blackberries 6 minutes, plums 10 minutes, strawberries 8 minutes, whortleberries 5 minutes, pie plant 10 minutes, small sour pears whole 30 minutes, Bartlett pears in halves 20 minutes, peaches in halves 8 minutes, peaches whole 15 minutes, pineapples sliced 15 minutes, Siberian or crab apples whole 25 minutes, sour apples quartered 10 minutes, ripe currants 6 minutes, wild grapes 10 minutes, tomatoes 20 minutes.

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. Plum + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Plum + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pear + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Plum + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at high concentration, helps it set and keeps it from spoiling.
Fruit
Provides the main flavour, colour and pectin-bearing body of the preserve.

The step that matters

Timing the boil for each fruit. Each fruit needs its own boiling time in the syrup. Boiling too long can break down the fruit and darken the flavour, while boiling too briefly leaves it underdone and the syrup too thin to set well.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, plum, pear, peach, pineapple, crab, apple):

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, plum, pear, peach, pineapple, crab, apple. 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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