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Dessert

Vegetable-marrow Jam,

A sweet preserve made from sliced vegetable marrows, sugar, and lemon juice.

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 marrows

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

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

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

Cook the jam

  1. Place the marrows in a preserving pan with the lemon juice.

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

  3. Cook gently until the marrows are transparent, about 1 hour.

Jar and store

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

  2. Once 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
Form the bulk of the jam, becoming tender and transparent as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the jam and, in quantity, helps preserve it and set its texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and supports setting and preservation.

The step that matters

Cook gently until the marrows are transparent. Low, gentle heat lets the marrow pieces soften and turn translucent without scorching the sugar. Cooking too hard can burn the sugar on the pan base and leave the jam dark and bitter, while undercooking leaves it watery and unpreserved.

“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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