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Dessert

Seville Orange Preserve

A preserve made from Seville oranges, lemons, sugar, and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon 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 ↓

Seville Orange Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the rinds of the oranges and lemons just deep enough to strip them in quarters with a spoon.

  2. Soak the rinds in cold spring water overnight.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender enough to pierce with a pin.

  4. Drain and cool the rinds.

  5. Scrape out the white part of the rind.

  6. Cut the remainder of the rind into thin chips.

  7. Remove the pips and film from the fruit pulp.

Cook the preserve

  1. Combine the pulp and rind chips in a preserving pan.

  2. Heat the mixture slowly.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes.

  4. Stir in the sugar until dissolved.

  5. Boil quickly for 20 minutes or until the mixture thickens and resembles jelly.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give the preserve its characteristic tangy flavour and pectin.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and natural pectin to help the preserve set.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, at high concentration, helps it thicken and keep.

The step that matters

Boil quickly for 20 minutes until the mixture thickens. Sugar must dissolve fully before a fast boil. The preserve sets when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration, so stopping too early leaves it runny and overcooking can make it dark and bitter.

“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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