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Dessert

Pbach Jam, or Marmaladb

A preserved peach spread made with sugar, lemon juice, and optional kernels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Pbach Jam, or Marmaladb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare the peaches by peeling and stoning them, then weigh them.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the peaches quickly for 45 minutes, stirring often.

  2. Remove from heat and mix in 2½ lbs of powdered sugar for each 4 lbs of peaches.

  3. Skim off any scum and boil briskly for 5 minutes.

  4. Add the strained juice of 1 or 2 lemons and continue boiling for 3 more minutes.

  5. Two minutes after adding the sugar, you can add blanched peach kernels if desired.

Jar

  1. Pour the marmalade into jars.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. 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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit body, flavour and bulk of the marmalade.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the fruit's pectin, helps the marmalade set and keep.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps pectin form a firm set.

The step that matters

Boiling after adding the sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the brisk boil, and the boil must be long enough to reach a set. Too little boiling leaves the marmalade runny, while overboiling can make it dark and sticky.

Swap the peach

The recipe marks peach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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