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Dessert

Preserved Lemons

A method of preserving lemons by soaking, boiling, and storing them in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Preserved Lemons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peels

  1. Cut lemons in half and extract the juice using a glass lemon squeezer. Discard the pulp.

  2. Slice the peels into circles.

  3. 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 and preserve

  1. Prepare a syrup with 2 pounds of sugar and 1 pint of water for each pound of peel, adding the lemon juice.

  2. Skim the syrup and let it cool.

  3. Add the peels and boil for 30 minutes.

  4. 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

Sugar
Sweetens the peels and, at this quantity, helps preserve them by drawing out water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the syrup and sharpens the sweet flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling the peels until tender before adding them to the syrup. Peel is bitter and tough when raw. Soaking and boiling soften it and draw out bitterness, so the peels cook evenly in the syrup and become tender rather than leathery.

“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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