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Dessert

Peach Jam, or Marmalade

A sweet preserve made from ripe peaches, sugar, lemon juice, and optional kernels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Peach Jam, or Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Finely chop the ripe peaches and weigh them.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the peaches quickly for 45 minutes, stirring often.

  2. Remove from heat and mix in the granulated sugar, stirring well.

  3. Skim off any scum and boil briskly for 5 minutes.

  4. Add the strained lemon juice and continue boiling for 3 more minutes.

  5. After 2 minutes, add the blanched peach kernels if using.

  6. Pour the marmalade into 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. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. 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

Ripe peaches
Provide the fruit bulk, flavour and pectin-bearing pulp that thickens the marmalade as it cooks.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and keeps it preserved.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the peach flavour and supports proper gel formation.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar-fruit mixture briskly. Sugar and fruit must reach a vigorous boil long enough for the pectin and acid to set the marmalade. Under-boiling leaves it runny, while over-boiling can darken and scorch the sugars.

Swap the peach

The recipe marks peach as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Peachthe 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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