Skip to main content
Dessert

Candied Fruit Peel

Candied fruit peel made by boiling peel, removing pith, simmering in sugar syrup, then rolling in sugar.

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 ↓

Candied Fruit Peel

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Wash and remove the skin of the orange or grapefruit.

  2. Boil the peel in water until tender, changing the water if it is very oily.

  3. Scrape off some of the inside white and cut the peel into even, narrow strips.

Candy the peel

  1. Make a syrup with ½ cup of sugar and ½ cup of the cooking water.

  2. Add the peel to the syrup and cook until nearly evaporated, stirring frequently.

  3. Drain the peel and roll it in granulated sugar.

  4. Let it dry before serving.

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

Orange or grapefruit peel
Provides the candied fruit flavor and the chewy base of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as it cooks down, coats it and helps preserve it.

The step that matters

Boiling the peel until tender. Boiling softens the bitter, tough peel and draws out excess oils. Changing the water when it is very oily removes more of the bitterness, so the candied peel tastes sweet rather than harsh.

“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