Skip to main content
Dessert

Kumquat Preserves

Preserves made by boiling sugar and water with kumquats, then cooling and sealing.

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

Why it works: Sugar and kumquat work together. They rank in the top 24% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 35 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Kumquat Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil 4 pints of sugar with 1 pint of water until thick to make a heavy syrup.

Cook and seal

  1. Add the kumquats and boil for 1.5 hours; do not simmer as it will toughen the rinds.

  2. Seal immediately after removing from heat, or serve with cream once cooled.

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 + kumquattop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together35 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Thickens the water into a heavy syrup and sweetens the fruit while it cooks.
Kumquats
Provide the fruit, which becomes tender and flavourful as it cooks in the syrup.

The step that matters

Keep the kumquats at a full boil, not a simmer, for the whole cooking time. The record states that simmering toughens the rinds. Prolonged cooking in syrup softens citrus peel, so a steady boil for the full 1.5 hours helps the rinds turn tender rather than tough.

“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.

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes