Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Lemons

Lemons are sliced, soaked, boiled, and cured in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 Lemons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Cut lemons in half.

  2. Extract the juice using a glass lemon squeezer. Discard the pulp.

  3. Slice the peels into circles and soak them in cold water for 24 hours, changing the water four times.

  4. Boil the peels in fresh cold water until tender.

Make the syrup

  1. Prepare a syrup by combining 2 pounds of sugar with 1 pint of water for each pound of peel.

  2. Add the juice of 1 lemon for each pound of fruit to the syrup.

  3. Skim the syrup and let it cool.

Cook and jar

  1. Add the peels to the syrup and boil for 30 minutes.

  2. Seal the preserved lemons in 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. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Lemon and sugar 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

Lemons
Provide the peel, which becomes tender and flavorful, and the juice that adds acidity.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the peel.

The step that matters

Soaking the peels for 24 hours. Soaking in repeatedly changed cold water draws out bitterness from the peel, so the finished lemons taste mellow rather than harsh.

“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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes