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Dessert

To Preserve Rhubarb

A preserve made from rhubarb, sugar, water, bitter almonds, and rhubarb juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Rhubarb and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 117 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

To Preserve Rhubarb

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the rhubarb

  1. Place the rhubarb in a preserve pan with water and cover with vine leaves.

  2. Simmer until tender, then strain through an earthenware colander.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Add sugar and a little juice to the strained rhubarb.

  2. Chop the blanched almonds and add a little to every 1 ½ pounds of boiled fruit.

  3. Boil gently for 30 minutes.

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. Rhubarb + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb
Forms the tart fruit base and most of the bulk of the preserve.
Loaf sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it thickens the syrup, helps the preserve keep.
Bitter almonds
Add a distinct bitter, nutty aroma that balances the sweet fruit.

The step that matters

Boiling gently after adding the sugar. As water evaporates, the sugar concentration rises and the preserve thickens. Boiling too hard can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pan and break the fruit apart, so a gentle boil keeps the texture and colour even.

Swap the rhubarb

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, almond):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Rhubarbthe original
  3. Nutmegfits less well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, almond. 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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