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Dessert

Preserving Fruits

A method for preserving fruit by boiling with sugar, clarifying syrup, candying, and drying.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserving Fruits

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a moderate oven”. The 350°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Make the preserve

  1. Boil 1 pound of fruit with ½ pint of water until soft.

  2. Add 1 pound of sugar and boil until the mixture thickens.

Clarify and candy

  1. Boil sugar with the whites of eggs to clarify the syrup.

  2. Let impurities rise to the top.

  3. Dip the fruit in hot water for candying.

  4. Drain the fruit.

  5. Sprinkle the fruit with sugar.

  6. Dry the sugared fruit on a sieve in a moderate oven (350°F / 175°C).

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fruit
Provides the body and flavour of the preserve once softened by boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens the mixture as it boils, helping it set.
Whites of eggs
Coagulate when heated, trapping impurities so they can be skimmed from the syrup.

The step that matters

Let impurities rise to the top. Egg whites coagulate as the syrup heats and carry impurities up as a scum. Skimming it off before it is discarded leaves a clearer syrup and a cleaner-looking preserve.

“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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