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Preserve

To Preserve Fruit in Boiling Water

This method preserves fruit by boiling it in water and sealing it with melted fat and a flour paste.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bottles

  1. Ensure bottles are dry and hot.

Fill and seal

  1. Fill bottles with fruit.

  2. Cover the fruit with boiling water.

  3. Melt 2 lbs. of mutton fat and ½ lb. of beef fat, then fill the bottles with this mixture.

  4. Cover immediately with paper and a paste made from flour and water.

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 + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mutton + flourtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 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

Mutton fat
Forms a solid seal over the fruit, keeping air out of the bottles.
Beef fat
Adds to the fat seal, helping it set firm and exclude air.
Flour
Mixed with water to make a paste that holds the paper cover in place.

The step that matters

Cover immediately with paper and paste. Fat must be poured over the fruit and the bottles sealed right away so that air cannot reach the fruit. Delay lets air in and allows spoilage to start.

“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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