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Preserved Pippins

Preserved pippins are sweetened bell-flowers boiled in syrup and canned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Preserved Pippins

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and 1 cup of water in a pot to make a syrup.

  2. Add the fruit and boil until clear.

Preserve the fruit

  1. Remove the fruit and continue boiling the syrup until thick.

  2. Stir in lemon extract to taste.

  3. Pour the syrup over the fruit and seal in tin cans.

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

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

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

Pippins or bell-flowers
Apples that supply the fruit itself, which softens and turns clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Provides sweetness and, as the syrup boils down, thickens it and helps preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Remove the fruit before boiling the syrup until thick. Boiling the syrup down concentrates the sugar as water evaporates. If the fruit stays in during this longer boil, it keeps cooking, breaks down and becomes mushy.

“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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