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To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

A method for preserving oranges or lemons in a sweet jelly using sugar, water, and fruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut a hole in the stalk of each orange or lemon, the size of a shilling, and scrape out the pulp without cutting the rind.

  2. Tie each fruit in muslin and soak in spring water for two days, changing the water twice a day.

  3. Boil the fruit in water until tender over a slow fire.

Make the syrup

  1. For the syrup, boil together 1 pint of water and 2 pounds of double‑refined sugar with the juice of the orange until it forms a syrup.

  2. Clarify the syrup by skimming and let it cool.

  3. Boil the fruit in the syrup for half an hour; repeat daily until clear.

Make the apple jelly and finish

  1. Pare and core green pippins, boil them in water until the water tastes strong of the apples, then strain through a jelly bag.

  2. To the strained water, add 1 pound of double‑refined sugar, the peel and juice of a lemon, and boil to a strong syrup.

  3. Drain the syrup from the fruit and place each orange or lemon hole‑up in a jar, pouring the apple jelly over them.

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

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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

Oranges or lemons
Provide the preserved fruit, whose rind becomes tender and translucent through long boiling and soaking.
Double-refined sugar
Sweetens the syrup and, at high concentration, helps preserve the fruit and give it a clear, firm texture.
Green pippins
Supply pectin-rich apple water that helps the jelly set around the fruit.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in syrup until clear. Sugar must gradually replace the water in the fruit. Boiling too hard or too briefly can toughen the rind or leave it cloudy, so the fruit should be simmered gently and the process repeated until translucent.

“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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