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Dessert

Preserves

A method for making fruit preserves by simmering fruit with sugar and water, then cooling and storing in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Preserves

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare the fruit and place it in wide-mouthed bottles.

  2. Sprinkle 6 ounces of sugar over the fruit.

  3. Reserve 2 ounces of sugar for later.

Cook the fruit

  1. Place the bottles in a pan of cold water and gradually heat.

  2. Simmer for 30 minutes.

  3. Fill the bottles from each other.

Make the syrup and finish

  1. For syrup, combine 12 to 32 ounces of sugar with 1 pint of water and simmer with lemon slices for 5 minutes.

  2. Strain the syrup.

  3. Let the syrup cool.

  4. Add the fruit in thin slices to the syrup.

  5. Simmer until the fruit is tender.

  6. Transfer the preserves to jars.

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).

  2. Currant + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,270 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

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

Fruit
Provides the main flavor and body of the preserves.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserves and helps draw out moisture and thicken the syrup.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps the fruit set.

The step that matters

Simmer until the fruit is tender. Cooking the fruit gently until just tender keeps its shape and texture. Overcooking breaks the slices down and makes the preserves mushy.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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