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To Salt Acid Tamarinds, Apples, Verjuice, Green Goose-berries, Currants F Barberries, &C.

A method of salting various acidic fruits with sugar and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Tamarind and apple work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 86 recipes. Both carry damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Salt Acid Tamarinds, Apples, Verjuice, Green Goose-berries, Currants F Barberries, &C.

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pulp the large fruit and mash the small fruit.

  2. Mix the sugar and salt together well.

  3. Use 1 ounce of the mixture for every pound of fruit.

Preserve

  1. If the fruit is liquid, dry it over the fire before mixing in the salt.

  2. Put the fruit in pots and cover them tightly.

  3. If the fruit is dry, it will keep for many years.

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. Tamarind + appletop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together86 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  3. Sugar + tamarindtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Sugar + appletop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

  5. Tamarind + curranttop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

Sugar and apple barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 by drawing out its moisture.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the fruit and slows spoilage by limiting microbial growth.
Fruit
Provides the main flavour, acidity and body of the preserve.

The step that matters

Drying liquid fruit before salting. Excess water dilutes the salt and sugar, weakening their ability to draw out moisture and inhibit spoilage. Drying the fruit first lets the mixture work as intended.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tamarind, apple. 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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