Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Citron, Orange and Lemon Peel

A preserved citrus peel made by soaking, rinsing, boiling, and cooking in a sugar syrup.

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

Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Citron, Orange and Lemon Peel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Soak the citrus peel in a mixture of salt and water overnight.

  2. Rinse the peel in three changes of water to freshen it.

  3. Boil the peel until tender.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Make a syrup by boiling 1 pint of water with 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Cook the peel in the syrup for 30 minutes.

  3. Optionally, cut the peel into fine strips before cooking.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Citrus peel
Provides the main texture and bitter citrus flavor once softened and candied.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, at high concentration in the syrup, helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Cooking the peel in the syrup. Simmering gently lets sugar slowly replace the water in the peel. Boiling hard can make the syrup crystallize and the peel tough or uneven.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes