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Preserving Fruit with and Without Sugar

A method of preserving various fruits in jars using sugar and cold water, cooked overnight in a low oven.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and pineapple work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 142 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Preserving Fruit with and Without Sugar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the water bath

  1. Place two square tinned copper vessels in the oven, one on the bottom shelf and one on the middle shelf.

  2. Pour cold water about 1 inch deep into each vessel.

Fill the jars

  1. In glass jars, place the prepared fruit: cherries, currants, gooseberries, strawberries, and blueberries.

  2. Add a large quantity of sugar to the gooseberries, a little to the strawberries and cherries, and none to the currants and blueberries.

  3. Fill the jars with cold water and place them in the tinned copper vessels, covering loosely.

Cook overnight and seal

  1. Cook in the oven overnight at about 200°F (93°C) without reaching boiling point.

  2. In the morning, fill each jar with water just off the boiling point and seal immediately.

  3. Place the jars in the hot water in the pans to cool gradually.

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. Currant + pineappletop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together142 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit, with more sugar in the gooseberries and less or none in the others.
Cherries
Provide the main fruit flesh and juice that the slow, gentle heat softens and preserves.
Gooseberries
Their natural tartness is balanced by the large amount of sugar added to them.

The step that matters

Keep the oven bath below boiling point overnight. Holding the jars just under boiling softens the fruit and drives off air without breaking down its structure or boiling the juice out. Higher heat can split the fruit and cause the jars to seal poorly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, 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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