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Dessert

Peach Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from peaches, sugar, water, lemon juice, and alcohol for covering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel, cut, and weigh the peaches.

  2. For every pound of fruit, use a pound of sugar.

Cook

  1. Cook the peaches in a small amount of water for 45 minutes, skimming carefully.

  2. Add the sugar and the kernels from cracked peach stones, along with 1 tablespoon of lemon juice.

  3. Boil everything together for 10 minutes.

Pot and cover

  1. Pour into small glasses and cover the next day with papers dipped in alcohol, then paste an outer paper over it.

  2. For a smoother texture, press the cooked peaches through a sieve before adding the sugar.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit body and flavor that the marmalade is built around.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, at high concentration, helps preserve the fruit and supports gel formation.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps the fruit set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boil everything together for 10 minutes. Sugar and fruit pectin must concentrate and reach gel point to set. Boiling too briefly leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking darkens its color and flavor.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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