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To Preserve Lemons

A method for preserving lemons by brining, slicing, soaking, boiling, and making a syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Preserve Lemons

Ingredients

Directions

Brine the rinds

  1. Juice the lemons and place the rinds in a brine that can float an egg.

  2. Let the rinds soak in the brine for 1 to 6 weeks.

Prepare the rinds

  1. Remove the rinds from the brine, weigh them, and slice them.

  2. Soak the slices in fresh cold water for 24 hours.

  3. Place the slices in a pot with cold water and boil until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. For the syrup, combine 1 pound of sugar with ½ pound of water and cook until thick.

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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Lemons
The rinds are the main ingredient, supplying the preserve's flavor and aromatic oils.
Coarse sea salt
Salt in the brine draws moisture out of the rinds and seasons them during curing.
Sugar
Sugar makes the syrup sweet and thick, and adds body to the finished preserve.

The step that matters

Brine strength. The brine must be salty enough to float an egg. Enough salt draws water out of the rinds and inhibits spoilage microbes during the long soak, so the rinds cure safely rather than rotting.

“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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