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Seville Orange Preserve

A preserve made from Seville oranges, lemons, and sugar, simmered until thick and jelly-like.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Seville Orange Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the rinds of the oranges and lemons deep enough to strip them off in quarters.

  2. Soak the rinds in cold spring water overnight.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender enough to pierce with a pin, then drain and cool.

  4. Scrape out the white part of the rind and cut the remainder into thin chips.

  5. Remove the pips and film from the fruit pulp.

Cook the preserve

  1. Combine the pulp and rind chips in a preserving pan and heat slowly.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then stir in the sugar until dissolved.

  3. Boil quickly for 20 minutes or until the mixture thickens and resembles jelly.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter flavour, aroma and pectin that help the preserve set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin to support setting and brighten the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken as it sets.

The step that matters

Boil quickly after adding the sugar. Sugar must dissolve fully before the rapid boil, otherwise crystals can form. A fast boil then drives off water so the pectin and sugar set the mixture to a jelly-like consistency.

“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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