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Cinnamon, Conserve of

A sweet preserve made by boiling sugar with cinnamon and clarified sugar or syrup of mallows.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Cinnamon, Conserve of

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 240°F in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the cinnamon

  1. Bruise the cinnamon and dilute it with a little clarified sugar or syrup of mallows.

Make the preserve

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches the soft ball stage (around 240°F or 115°C).

  2. Add the cinnamon to the boiling sugar and stir well.

  3. Remove from heat when the sugar begins to whiten.

Set

  1. Pour the conserve into cases or molds and dry as usual.

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. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Cinnamon
Provides the main aroma and flavour of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled, helps it set into a firm mass.

The step that matters

Removing from heat as the sugar whitens. Sugar boiled past the right point becomes hard and brittle, while stopping too early leaves it soft and sticky. Watching for the whitening sign helps the conserve set with the right texture.

“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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