Why it works: Sugar and lime are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓
Fruit Preserver
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Mix the sugar with the sulphite of lime.
Sprinkle the mixture over each gallon of prepared fruit.
Cover and store
Place the fruit in stone or earthen vessels and cover with a cloth.
To prevent mould, saturate the cloth with spirits.
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.
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Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together3,332 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
- White sugar
- Sweetens the fruit and draws out moisture, helping to preserve it.
- Sulphite of lime
- Acts as a preservative that slows spoilage and discolouration in the fruit.
- Fruit
- The main food being preserved; its sugar and moisture content shape how it keeps.
The step that matters
Mix the sulphite of lime evenly with the sugar. Sulphite is a strong preservative, so it needs to be well blended with the sugar and spread across the fruit, rather than clumped in one spot, for the whole batch to be protected.
“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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