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Dessert

Crystallized Fruit

A confection of fruits coated in sugar and dried in a cooling oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 114 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Crystallized Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select the finest fruits, leaving their stalks on.

  2. Pare oranges and lemons carefully, then remove the white inner skin of oranges and lemons.

  3. Slice lemons thinly.

  4. Cut oranges into quarters.

  5. Choose the largest and finest cherries, strawberries, and currants without stems.

  6. Pare peaches, then cut peaches in halves.

  7. Leave stems on.

  8. Slice pineapples thinly, then cut those slices into quarters.

Ice the fruit

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Dip the fruits in the beaten egg with stalks upward.

  3. Drain the fruits.

  4. Rebeat the egg that drips off.

  5. Dip each fruit into finely powdered sugar.

Set and dry

  1. Line a pan with fine paper.

  2. Place the sugared fruit inside.

  3. Put the pan in a cooling oven until the icing firms.

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. Peach + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Pear + pineappletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together169 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Peach + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg whites
Beaten whites form a thin coating that dries into a crisp, glossy icing shell on the fruit.
Finely powdered sugar
Sugar coats the fruit and dries with the egg white into a sweet, crisp, opaque icing.

The step that matters

Put the pan in a cooling oven until the icing firms. The oven must be cool enough that the egg white dries and sets without browning or puffing. Too much heat can cook the coating unevenly or brown it.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, sugar, orange, lemon, peach, pear, pineapple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, sugar, orange, lemon, peach, pear, pineapple. 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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