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Dessert

Fruit Glace

Fruit Glace is candied fruit made by coating various fruits in a sugar syrup that hardens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Glace

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining water, sugar, and lemon juice in a porcelain-lined kettle.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes without stirring.

  3. Test the syrup by dropping a little into cold water; it should be hard and brittle.

Coat and set the fruit

  1. If ready, pour the syrup into a small dish and keep it liquid in a pan of boiling water.

  2. Dip fruits into the syrup, coating them thoroughly.

  3. Place the coated fruits on buttered paper or a dish to harden.

  4. For oranges, divide into sections, skewer, and ice them.

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 + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Banana + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Grape + bananatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Grape + peachtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, green).

  5. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the syrup that hardens into a brittle, glossy coating on the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that helps keep the syrup from crystallising.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can be boiled into a syrup.

The step that matters

Testing the syrup before dipping. Syrup that has not boiled long enough stays soft and sticky, while overcooked syrup turns dark and bitter. The cold-water test shows whether it has reached the hard-crack stage needed for a brittle coating.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, grape, banana, orange, peach):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits about as well
  3. Walnutthe original
  4. Chestnutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, grape, banana, orange, peach. 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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