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Dessert

Sweet Pickles or Spiced Fruits

A preserved fruit dish made by boiling fruit with sugar, vinegar, and spices, then repeatedly steeping in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Sweet Pickles or Spiced Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Tie the spices in one or more bags and boil them in the vinegar and sugar.

  2. Skim the mixture well, then add the fruit and boil until scalded and tender.

Pack and pour

  1. Remove the fruit and pack it carefully in stone jars.

  2. Boil the syrup for five more minutes, then pour it over the fruit.

  3. The next day, pour off the syrup, boil it again, and pour it back on the fruit; repeat this for three consecutive days.

  4. Keep the bags of spices in the syrup and place one on top of each jar of fruit.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + cassiatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  5. Clove + cassiatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together194 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Provides the bulk of the pickle and absorbs the sweet, spiced syrup as it softens.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the pickle and, with the vinegar, helps preserve the fruit.
Vinegar
Acidity preserves the fruit and balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Mixed whole spices
Infuse the syrup with aroma and flavour while the bags stay in the liquid.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup boiling over three days. Reboiling the syrup each day draws it into the fruit gradually and helps concentrate and preserve it. Skipping days or letting the syrup stop boiling can leave the fruit under-flavoured or more prone to spoiling.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, allspice, clove, cinnamon, cassia):

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Gingerfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, allspice, clove, cinnamon, cassia. 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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