Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Preserves

Fruit preserves are made by cooking fruit with sugar until syrup thickens, then jarred and sealed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Peach and pear match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 114 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Fruit Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Weigh the fruit before cooking.

  2. Cook the fruit until almost done.

Make the syrup

  1. Add sugar to the fruit and cook until the syrup is as thick as honey.

Jar and seal

  1. Carefully place the fruit into jars.

  2. Pour the syrup over the fruit.

  3. Seal jars with melted paraffin and cover with paper to exclude dust.

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. Peach + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together114 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

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

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Provides the bulk, flavour and body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup, helping it keep well.

The step that matters

Cooking the sugar syrup to honey thickness. Sugar must be cooked until the syrup is thick enough. Too little cooking leaves a runny preserve that spoils more easily, while overcooking makes it stiff and may scorch the sugar.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, 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.

More fruit preserves recipes

Spiced 5Dried 3 See all 91 →

You might also like

Peach Ice CreamPeach Ice Cream64 recipesPeach FrittersPeach Fritters55 recipesPeach MeringuePeach Meringue40 recipesPeach IcePeach Ice16 recipes