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Dessert

Preserved Figured Oranges

A preserved orange recipe where oranges are carved, boiled, and stored in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Figured Oranges

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Cut out figures from the rind of the oranges using cutters.

  2. Boil the oranges in water until tender, then drain them.

Make the syrup and cook the oranges

  1. Prepare a strong syrup by boiling sugar with water until it reaches a thick consistency.

  2. Place the oranges in the syrup.

  3. Boil the oranges in the syrup for 8-9 times, pouring the syrup over them each day for three days.

  4. Boil the syrup to a 'grande perle' stage.

  5. Add the oranges to the syrup.

  6. Boil once more, skimming off any foam.

Jar and seal

  1. Transfer the oranges to jars.

  2. Seal tightly.

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

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
Provide the fruit and rind, which softens when boiled and absorbs the sweet syrup.
Sugar
Forms a thick syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Bringing the syrup to the grande perle stage. The syrup must be concentrated enough to preserve the fruit. Sugar at a high enough concentration limits water and microbial activity, so a syrup cooked too little may let the oranges spoil in the jars.

“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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