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Dessert

Preserved Pippests

Preserved pippins are fruit preserved in a sugar syrup with lemon extract.

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 Pippests

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve sugar in water to make a syrup.

  2. Boil the fruit in the syrup until clear.

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

  4. Add lemon extract to taste.

Preserve and seal

  1. Pour the syrup over the fruit to preserve it.

  2. Transfer to tin cans while boiling and seal.

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
Provides the fruit that is cooked until clear and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Dissolves into the syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.
Lemon extract
Adds a bright citrus aroma to the finished syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar syrup must reach a high enough concentration to hold the fruit and resist spoilage. Boiling off water raises the sugar content, so under-boiling leaves the preserve thin and less stable.

“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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