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Dessert

Peach Marmalade

A sweet preserve made by cooking peaches with sugar, lemon juice, and kernel water until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, stone, and weigh the peaches.

  2. Heat the peaches slowly to draw out the juice, stirring often with a wooden spoon.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Once hot, boil quickly for 30 minutes, stirring continuously.

  2. Add sugar and boil for 5 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  3. Stir in lemon juice and the water from boiling the peach kernels.

  4. Stew all together for 10 minutes, stirring to a smooth paste.

Jar and store

  1. Transfer the hot marmalade into air‑tight cans or cool jars, covering with brandied tissue paper.

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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

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

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

Peaches
Provide the fruit, pectin and flavour that form the body of the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and keep as it cooks.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Boil the peaches quickly for 30 minutes. Stirring continuously prevents the fruit from scorching on the pan base, and sustained boiling drives off water so the marmalade thickens properly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, 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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