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Dessert

Mixed Marmalade

A preserved fruit spread made from apples, pears, and plums sweetened with sugar and rose-water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mixed Marmalade

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Core and peel the apples and pears.

  2. Remove the stones from the plums.

  3. Blanch the plum kernels and pound them with a little rose-water.

  4. Combine all the fruits in a jar with a little sugar, but do not add water.

Cook

  1. Bake the mixture in a cool oven.

  2. Beat the mixture in a preserving pan, then stir in the sugar.

  3. Boil for one hour.

Dry and set

  1. Pour the marmalade into small deep dishes and dry it gently in a cool oven.

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. Pear + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Apple + peartop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Apple + plumtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together404 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pear + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,079 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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

Apples
Provide pectin and body, giving the marmalade its thick, spreadable structure.
Pears
Add bulk and soft pulp, contributing moisture and a mellow sweetness to the set.
Plums
Add tartness and flavour that balances the sugar in the finished preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it concentrates during boiling, helps the marmalade set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil for one hour. Boiling concentrates the fruit and sugar until the mixture thickens. Undercooking leaves it runny, while overcooking can darken and stiffen it, so the timing matters.

Swap the plum

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Quincefits about as well
  3. Peachfits about as well
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, pear, sugar, rose. 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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