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Dessert

Orange Preserves

A sweet preserve made by cooking orange pieces with sugar, water, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Orange Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Cut the oranges into pieces about ¼ inch thick and remove the seeds.

  2. Soak the orange pieces in water for several hours.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine the sugar and water.

  2. Boil and skim the syrup.

Cook and finish

  1. Add the soaked oranges to the syrup and cook slowly for 1 hour.

  2. Remove the oranges and continue cooking the syrup.

  3. Add the lemon juice to the syrup and cook for an additional 30 minutes.

  4. Strain the syrup over the cooked oranges.

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

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 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

Oranges
Provide the fruit body and bitter-citrus aroma that the preserve is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as the syrup concentrates, helps preserve it and gives it body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps the preserve set.

The step that matters

Cooking the oranges slowly in the syrup. Cooking gently keeps the orange pieces intact while they soften and absorb syrup. Boiling hard can break them apart and make the syrup cloudy or bitter.

“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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