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To Preserve Lemon Peel

A method for preserving lemon peel by soaking, boiling, and syruping.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Preserve Lemon Peel

Ingredients

Directions

Soak

  1. Squeeze the juice from the lemons and place the rinds and pulps in water, covering them completely. Let them soak for two weeks.

  2. Remove the pulp and boil the rinds in the soaking water until they can be pierced with a knitting needle.

Preserve in syrup

  1. Make a syrup using equal weights of brown sugar and rinds, then pour the boiling syrup over the rinds.

  2. Cover the mixture tightly and let it sit for three weeks.

  3. Boil the rinds again in the syrup and cover for storage.

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 rinds that are preserved and the juice that is squeezed out first.
Brown sugar
Sweetens the rinds and, with its syrup, helps preserve them over the weeks of sitting.

The step that matters

Boiling the rinds until pierceable. Boiling softens the thick pith and peel so the rinds become tender enough to absorb syrup. Undercooked rinds stay tough and won't take up the sugar evenly.

“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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