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Dessert

Compotes De Citron, Orange or Limes

A compote made from lemon, orange or lime pieces simmered in water, sweetened with sugar, and served cold.

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

Compotes De Citron, Orange or Limes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the fruits into small pieces.

  2. Simmer the fruit in water until soft.

  3. Remove the fruit with a strainer and place it in cold water.

Make the compote

  1. Make a syrup with ¼ pound of sugar and 1 cup of water.

  2. Add the fruit to the syrup and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Arrange in a serving dish and serve cold.

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

Citrus fruit (lemon, orange, or lime)
Provides the main flavor and tart acidity, and its pectin helps the compote thicken as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the compote and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that the fruit simmers in.

The step that matters

Simmering the fruit until soft before making the syrup. Simmering the fruit in plain water first softens the peel and softens its bitterness. Cooking it too briefly leaves the peel tough, while overcooking can break the pieces down. Draining and chilling the fruit stops further cooking before it joins the syrup.

“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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