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To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

A method for preserving oranges or lemons in a sugar syrup jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut a hole in the stalk of each orange or lemon, the size of a shilling, and scrape out the pulp without cutting the rind.

  2. Soak the fruit in muslin in spring water for two days, changing the water twice a day.

  3. Boil the fruit in water until tender on a slow fire.

Make the syrup

  1. For every pound of fruit, use 4 cups of double refined sugar and 1 pint of water.

  2. Boil together with the juice of the orange to make a syrup.

  3. Clarify the syrup by skimming well.

  4. Let the syrup cool.

Preserve and jar

  1. Boil the fruit in the syrup for half an hour.

  2. Repeat daily until clear.

  3. Pour the syrup over the fruit in jars, with the hole facing upwards.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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

Sugar
Preserves the fruit and sweetens the peel, building the thick syrup that keeps it.
Oranges or lemons
Supply the peel and pulp that become the preserved fruit itself.

The step that matters

Repeated boiling in the syrup until clear. Peel must be boiled and rested in syrup over several days so sugar slowly replaces the water in the rind. Rushing this leaves the peel tough, cloudy, or prone to spoiling.

“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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