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Dessert

Vegetable-marrow Jam,

Jam made from thinly peeled vegetable marrows, sugar, and lemon, cooked until translucent.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable-marrow Jam,

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the marrow

  1. Peel the marrows very thinly and remove the seeds.

  2. Cut the marrow into neat pieces, about 1 inch square.

  3. Weigh the pieces and use an equal weight of sugar.

Cook

  1. Place the marrows in a preserving pan with the juice of one lemon for each pound of marrow.

  2. Stir gently over low heat until the sugar melts.

  3. Cook gently until the vegetable marrow is transparent, about 1 hour.

  4. Remove from heat and let cool slightly before transferring to jam jars.

Store

  1. Once completely cool, cover the jars and store in a cool, dry place.

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

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

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

Vegetable marrows
Provides the bulk of the jam, becoming tender and translucent as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, as it dissolves, draws out moisture and helps it set.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Cooking until the marrow is transparent. Cooking gently keeps the marrow from scorching on the pan base while the sugar draws out moisture. Stopping too early leaves the pieces opaque and the jam runny, while overcooking darkens and toughens the sugar-rich syrup.

“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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