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Dessert

Sirup for Preserves

A syrup made from sugar, water, and egg white used to preserve fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Sirup for Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine sugar and water in a white porcelain saucepan.

  2. Heat the mixture and stir in the beaten egg white before it gets hot.

  3. Once it begins to boil, remove any scum that rises.

  4. Continue boiling until no more scum appears.

Cook the fruit

  1. Prepare fruits: peel and halve peaches, peel and core pears, prick and halve greengages, core Siberian crab-apples, and cut stems from cherries.

  2. Gently boil the fruits in the syrup until just soft, being careful not to break them.

  3. Remove cooked fruits and repeat with remaining pieces.

Jar and finish

  1. Pour the syrup over the fruits and transfer to jars.

  2. Optionally, add a little lemon juice to pear, crab-apple, and plum preserves.

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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at this concentration, helps it keep and set as it cooks.
Egg white
Its proteins bind to impurities and rise as scum, which can then be skimmed off to clear the syrup.

The step that matters

Add the egg white before the mixture gets hot. The partly beaten egg white must be stirred in while the syrup is still cool so it spreads evenly and can collect impurities as it heats. Adding it into a hot mixture can cause it to set in lumps instead of clarifying the syrup.

“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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