Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓
To Preserve Oranges or Lemons
Ingredients
Directions
Make the syrup
Weigh 2 pounds of double-refined sugar and 1 pint of water; boil together with the juice of the orange to make a syrup.
Clarify the syrup, skim well, and let it cool.
Preserve the fruit
Boil the fruit in the syrup for half an hour; repeat daily until clear.
Make the pippin jelly
Pare and core green pippins, boil in water until strong in flavor, then strain through a jelly bag until clear.
To each pint of the strained water, add 1 pound of double-refined sugar, the peel, and juice of a lemon; boil to a strong syrup.
Pack and cover
Drain the syrup from the fruit, place each orange hole-up in a jar, and pour the apple jelly over it.
Cover with brandy paper.
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.
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Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together10,634 recipes
Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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
- Oranges or lemons
- Provide the fruit that becomes tender and translucent as it slowly soaks in the syrup.
- Double-refined sugar
- Forms a concentrated syrup that sweetens the fruit and helps preserve it.
- Lemon peel and juice
- Adds acidity and aromatic oils that brighten the sweet syrup.
- Orange juice
- Adds acidity and citrus flavor to the initial syrup.
The step that matters
Repeated boiling of the fruit in syrup. Simmering the fruit gently in syrup, then repeating daily, lets sugar slowly replace water in the peel so it turns clear. Boiling hard can break the fruit apart, and stopping early leaves it cloudy and tough.
“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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