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Dessert

Fruit Glace

Fruit Glace is candied fruit prepared by boiling sugar, lemon juice, and water, then coating fruit pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Glace

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar and lemon juice for 30 minutes.

  2. Dip a skewer into the syrup, then dip the skewer into water; if the thread breaks off brittle, the syrup is ready.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare and divide oranges into eighths, wiping them dry.

Coat the fruit

  1. Pour part of the syrup into a small cup.

  2. Place the cup in boiling water.

  3. Skewer each piece of orange and dip it into the syrup.

  4. Place the orange pieces on a lightly buttered dish.

  5. Prepare grapes and nuts the same way.

  6. Do not stir the syrup to avoid spoiling it.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Granulated sugar
Forms the syrup that cooks to a hard, brittle glaze that sets on the fruit.
Lemon juice
Acidity helps keep the boiled sugar syrup smooth and less prone to crystallising.
Oranges
The fruit pieces are the base that the glossy syrup coats and sets on.

The step that matters

Judging when the syrup is ready. The skewer and water test decides when the syrup is ready. If it is not cooked long enough the glaze stays sticky, and stirring can encourage sugar to crystallise, so the syrup is left unstirred.

“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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