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Dessert

Peach Jam, or Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from ripe peaches, sugar, lemon juice, and optional blanched 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 ↓

Peach Jam, or Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Weigh and boil the peaches quickly for 45 minutes, stirring often.

  2. Remove from heat and mix in 2½ lbs of powdered sugar.

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

Finish and jar

  1. Add the strained juice of 2 lemons and boil for an additional 3 minutes.

  2. Two minutes after adding sugar, stir in the blanched peach kernels if using.

  3. 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
Supply the fruit, flavour and bulk that form the body of the jam.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, with the fruit and acid, helps it thicken and set.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the jam set.

The step that matters

Boiling briskly after skimming. The jam must reach a hard, rapid boil to dissolve the sugar and concentrate the fruit enough to set. Boiling too little leaves it runny, while boiling too long darkens the colour and makes it stiff.

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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