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Dessert

Melon Rind Preserves

A preserve made by boiling melon rinds with sugar to create a candied product.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Melon and sugar work together. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 796 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Melon Rind Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the melon rinds into small strips or squares.

  2. Weigh the rinds and use an equal weight of sugar.

Cook and store

  1. Boil the rinds and sugar together slowly for two hours.

  2. Transfer the mixture into pots for storage.

Flavor and candy lemon peel

  1. For added flavor, boil lemon peel with the rinds.

  2. To candy lemon peel, boil it with sugar and expose it to air until the sugar crystallizes.

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. Melon + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together796 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Melon rinds
Form the bulk of the candy, becoming tender and translucent as they absorb the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the rinds and, as it cooks into syrup, preserves them and forms the candied coating.

The step that matters

Slow boiling for two hours. Boiling slowly lets the sugar syrup gradually penetrate the rind, so it becomes tender and translucent rather than tough. A fast boil can scorch the sugar before the syrup has been absorbed.

“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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