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Dessert

Preserves

This dish is dried fruit preserved with powdered sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 200°F (93°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Layer fruit in a sieve and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

  2. Let the sugar penetrate the fruit while the fluid evaporates.

Dry and store

  1. Dry the fruit in the oven at 200°F (93°C), turning every 6-8 hours and adding more sugar each time.

  2. Store the dried fruit in a dry place, such as drawers or boxes.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Currant + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

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

  4. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Powdered loaf sugar
Draws moisture out of the fruit and forms a sweet, preserving coating on its surface.
Fruit
Provides the flavour and texture that concentrate as the water evaporates during drying.

The step that matters

Adding sugar at each turning. Sugar draws water out of the fruit and helps it keep. Adding more sugar each time keeps the surface coated as moisture leaves, which supports preservation.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, lemon. 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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