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Another Receipt for Stewed Peaches

A sweet dish of peaches stewed in a light sugar syrup with lemon juice.

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 ↓

Another Receipt for Stewed Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. If peaches are not perfectly ripe, blanch them in boiling water until the skin can be easily removed.

Stew the peaches

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan and boil to a light syrup.

  2. Add peaches to the syrup and stew gently until tender, stirring occasionally.

Finish the syrup

  1. Dish the peaches and add lemon juice to the syrup.

  2. Reduce the syrup by boiling it quickly for a few minutes.

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 fruit that softens during gentle stewing and gives the dish its flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps the peaches keep their shape while stewing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup and the fruit.

The step that matters

Stew gently until tender. Boiling peaches hard breaks them down and toughens the flesh, so a gentle simmer softens them evenly while keeping their shape.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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.

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