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Apple Preserve

A sweet preserve made by boiling apples with sugar and lemon until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,551 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Apple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a preserving pan, boil 1 pint of water with 1½ lb of loaf sugar until it becomes a rich syrup.

Cook the preserve

  1. Add 2 lb of prepared apples, grated lemon peel, and lemon juice.

  2. Boil until the mixture reduces to a pulp.

Set and cool

  1. Transfer to molds and allow to cool.

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. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

Loaf sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, once boiled into syrup, helps it thicken and set.
Apples
Provide the bulk of the preserve, breaking down into pulp as they cook.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports setting.
Lemon peel
Adds aromatic oils that give the preserve a fresh citrus fragrance.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture reduces to a pulp. Apples need sustained boiling to soften fully and release pectin, and cooking too briefly leaves the preserve runny or uneven when it cools.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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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