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Dessert

Preserved Oranges

Preserved oranges are oranges boiled, sweetened with sugar, and stored in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Oranges

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the oranges.

  2. Boil the oranges in water until a straw can pass through them.

  3. For each pound of fruit, use ¾ pound of sugar.

Syrup and soak

  1. Remove the oranges from the water and pour hot syrup over them.

  2. Let them stand overnight.

Finish

  1. The next day, boil the oranges in the syrup until it thickens and becomes clear.

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. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Oranges
Make up the fruit that is softened, then candied and preserved in the syrup.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that preserves the fruit and turns it clear and thick as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the oranges until a straw can pass through them. Peel and boil until the rind is fully softened before adding syrup. Undercooked peel stays tough and resists the sugar, so the fruit will not turn tender and translucent.

“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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