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Wiesbaden Preserves

A preserve made by fermenting freshly picked berries with sugar, water, and sweet olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 35% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,483 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Wiesbaden Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the berries

  1. Remove the hulls from the berries and place them in earthen dishes.

  2. Add sugar generously to the berries without stirring.

  3. Set the berries aside in a cool place for 3–4 hours or overnight if it is cool.

  4. Pour off the juice extracted from the berries into a kettle, adding ½ cup of water for every 4 quarts of juice.

Pack the bottles

  1. Bring the juice to a boil.

  2. Add enough berries to fill one bottle.

  3. Gently stir the berries for about 2 minutes.

  4. Lift the berries out with a strainer, leaving the juice behind.

  5. Fill the bottle two-thirds full with the berries.

  6. Place the bottle in a pan of hot water to keep it warm.

  7. Repeat the process until all berries are used.

  8. Fill each bottle with boiling juice afterward.

  9. Add 1 teaspoon of sweet olive oil to the neck of each bottle.

  10. Seal the bottle quickly.

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 + olivetop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and olive barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,483 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

Sugar
Draws juice out of the berries and adds sweetness to the preserve.
Sweet olive oil
Forms a thin layer at the bottle neck that helps seal out air.

The step that matters

Seal the bottle quickly. Sealing while the contents are still hot and the bottle is full creates a vacuum as they cool, which keeps air out and limits spoilage. Delay lets air enter and weakens the seal.

“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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