Skip to main content
Dessert

Citron Preserves

Citron preserves are made by boiling citron and lemons with sugar and alum, then simmering until translucent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Citron Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the citron

  1. Cut the citron into pieces about ½ inch thick.

  2. Boil the citron in alum water (1 dessert spoon of alum per gallon of water) for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the citron and soak it in fresh water overnight.

  4. In the morning, boil the citron in fresh water until it changes color and becomes soft.

Make the syrup

  1. Slice the lemons thinly, remove the seeds, and boil them in 1 cup of water until soft.

  2. Strain the lemon water and take 1 quart of it.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon slices to the quart of lemon water and boil slowly until the citron is transparent.

Finish

  1. Can the preserves.

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. 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

Citron
Forms the bulk of the preserve and becomes tender and translucent as it cooks in syrup.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as syrup, slowly draws into the citron to make it transparent.
Lemons
Adds acidity and bright aroma that balance the sweetness of the sugar.
Pulverized alum
Firms the citron's tissue so it holds its shape through repeated boiling.

The step that matters

Boil the citron slowly in the syrup. Sugar moves into the citron gradually by osmosis. A hard, rapid boil can break the pieces apart and toughen them, so a slow simmer lets the syrup penetrate evenly until the fruit turns transparent.

“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.

You might also like

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