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Preserve

To Preserve Fruit in Syrup

A method for preserving fruit by cooking it in a sugar syrup and sealing it in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mutton and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,373 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Preserve Fruit in Syrup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1 quart of water with ½ to 1 lb of sugar in a pot, depending on the fruit's sweetness.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes to create a syrup.

Cook the fruit

  1. Add the fruit to the boiling syrup, ensuring it is well skimmed and strained for clarity.

  2. Cook the smaller fruits for a few minutes.

  3. Do not cook very soft fruit.

Bottle and seal

  1. Prepare heated bottles and fill them with the fruit and boiling syrup.

  2. Screw on the lids immediately if using patent bottles.

  3. Pour a layer of melted fat over the tops of ordinary bottles to exclude air.

  4. Cover with paper using a paste of raw flour and water or with pieces of bladder while still hot.

  5. Optionally, cover the syrup with pure olive oil to exclude air.

  6. Test patent bottles by turning them upside down.

  7. If they leak, heat them up again and seal with wax.

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. Mutton + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,373 recipes

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

  2. Beef + olivetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,220 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Mutton + olivetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + muttontop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together726 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + olivetop 35% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,483 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and olive barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,483 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
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit's shape and flavor.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to form the syrup that surrounds the fruit.

The step that matters

Do not overcook the fruit. Soft fruit breaks down quickly in boiling syrup, becoming mushy and cloudy. Cooking smaller fruits only briefly keeps them intact and the syrup clear.

“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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