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Dessert

Confectionery, Cakes, and Preserves

Fruit preserves made by cooking fresh fruit with sugar and water, then sealing in pots with egg white and a split bladder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Confectionery, Cakes, and Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Gather ripe and fresh fruit on a dry day.

  2. In a clean copper or brass preserving pan, combine 1 lb of sugar with ½ cup of water.

  3. Do not boil the fruit too long to avoid hardening it.

Fill and cover

  1. Fill pots or bottles with preserves, leaving a quarter inch from the top.

  2. Cover with strong cap paper.

  3. Brush the cap paper with egg white to seal.

  4. Label each pot with its contents and date.

Rest and seal

  1. Let the pots sit uncovered for two days.

  2. Seal the pots with a split bladder.

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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and bulk of the preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the fruit.
Egg white
Acts as a glue that helps the cap paper stick and seal the pot.

The step that matters

Do not boil the fruit too long. Prolonged boiling can harden the fruit and spoil its texture, so the fruit should be cooked only until it is done.

“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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