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Dessert

Preserved Melons in Strup

A preserved melon dish made by boiling melons in a sugar syrup and storing them in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Melon and lemon work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 362 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Preserved Melons in Strup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the melons

  1. Cut the melons into quarters.

  2. Remove the seeds from the melons.

  3. Peel off the rinds of the melons.

  4. Parboil the melons for 3 minutes.

  5. Immerse the parboiled melons in cold water and drain them.

  6. Place the melons in an earthen bowl.

Make the syrup and soak

  1. Boil 3 pounds of sugar with 1¼ pounds of water to make a syrup.

  2. Skim the syrup well.

  3. Pour the boiling syrup over the melons and cover with paper.

  4. Let the mixture sit for 24 hours.

  5. Drain the syrup.

  6. Boil the syrup again, adding more sugar.

  7. Boil the syrup to a thread.

  8. Let the syrup cool.

  9. Pour the cooled syrup over the melons again.

Finish and jar

  1. Boil the syrup again the next day to the same degree.

  2. Skim the syrup well.

  3. Pour the hot syrup over the melons.

  4. Boil the syrup to a thick thread.

  5. Add the melons to the syrup.

  6. Let the mixture boil up twice.

  7. Boil the syrup again the following day to the same degree.

  8. Add the melons to the syrup.

  9. Simmer slowly for 5 minutes.

  10. Put the melons in glass jars.

  11. Cover the jars tightly when cool.

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. Melon + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Melon + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together796 recipes

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

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

Melons
The fruit that is preserved, absorbing the syrup as it soaks and cooks.
Sugar
Concentrated syrup preserves the fruit and gives it sweetness.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup to a thread. The syrup must reach a thick, concentrated stage before the melons go in. Enough dissolved sugar draws water out of the fruit and helps keep it preserved, so the boiling stages should not be rushed or skipped.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (melon, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against melon, 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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