Skip to main content
Dessert

Observations on Preserving

A syrup for preserving fruit made with sugar, water, egg white, and cold water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Observations on Preserving

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Gather fruit in dry weather, selecting only the best quality and discarding bruised fruit.

Make the syrup

  1. In a preserving pan, combine 5 pounds of sugar with 5 pints of cold spring water.

  2. Lightly beat the egg white and add it to the sugar mixture, stirring gently.

  3. Set the pan over low heat and dissolve the sugar, allowing scum to rise.

  4. After boiling for 5 minutes, remove from heat and skim the scum off.

  5. Boil again, then add ½ cup of cold water to bring up remaining scum.

  6. Skim until the syrup is clear, then strain through a fine cloth.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Provides sweetness and the syrup body that preserves the fruit.
Egg white
Binds to impurities as it heats, so scum rises and can be skimmed off.

The step that matters

Skimming the syrup. Scum must be removed completely while the syrup is clear and hot. Leftover scum can cloud the syrup and cause spoilage in the finished preserves.

“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.

More fruit preserves recipes

Spiced 5Dried 3 See all 91 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes