Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Citron

A preserved fruit made by boiling citron and lemons with sugar into a syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Citron

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the citron

  1. Remove seeds from the citron cubes.

  2. Boil the citron in clear water until very tender, then skim out.

Make the syrup

  1. In the same water, add sugar and boil until it forms a thick syrup.

Prepare the lemons

  1. Cut the lemons in half and boil them in a small amount of water for 20 minutes.

  2. Squeeze and strain the juice and water from the boiled lemons.

Combine and finish

  1. Add the citron to the syrup and boil for 15 minutes.

  2. Add the lemon juice and water 10 minutes before removing from heat.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Citron
Provides the main bulk and candied texture once softened and sugared.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, boiled into syrup, penetrates and preserves it.
Lemons
Add acidity and aroma to balance the sweetness of the syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the citron until very tender before adding sugar. Citron must be softened fully in plain water first, because sugar hardens the fruit's tissue and prevents it from becoming tender later.

“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.

More preserved citron recipes

Melon 10 See all 34 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes