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Dessert

Water-melon or Citron Preserves

Preserves made from watermelon or citron rinds simmered with salt, alum, ginger tea, and sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and tea work together. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 216 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Water-melon or Citron Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Pare the rinds and soak them in salt water overnight.

  2. Soak in clear water until all the salt is extracted.

  3. Scald in alum water with grape or butter bean leaves and the lump of alum.

  4. Transfer to cold water, then boil in clear water.

  5. Boil in ginger tea.

Make the preserves

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pound of sugar and 1 pint of water.

  2. When the syrup boils, add the fruit and cook until tender and transparent.

  3. Remove the fruit and boil the syrup 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. Ginger + teatop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together216 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  3. Tea + sugartop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,204 recipes

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

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Watermelon or citron rind
Forms the main body of the preserve, becoming tender and translucent as it cooks in syrup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water and salt out of the rind during the initial overnight soak.
Alum
Helps the rind stay firm and crisp during repeated boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled into syrup, thickens it and preserves the fruit.

The step that matters

Removing the salt and alum. Rinsing and soaking until all the salt is extracted matters because residual salt will taste harsh in the finished preserve. Alum tightens the rind's texture, so it should be used only in the small amount the record gives.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tea, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Peppermintfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against tea, sugar. 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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