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Dessert

Preserved Citron

A preserved citron made by boiling, soaking, and syruping with sugar, ginger, and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Preserved Citron

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the citron

  1. Pare the citron melons.

  2. Cut the citron melons into half‑moon shaped pieces, about ½ inch thick.

  3. Boil the citron pieces in soda water until tender.

  4. Skim the citron pieces and place them in weak alum water for 3 hours.

  5. Soak the citron pieces in cold water for 1 hour.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1 quart of water and 4 pounds of sugar in a pot.

  2. Boil the syrup and remove any scum.

  3. Add the citron pieces to the clear syrup and let them soak until the sugar has fully penetrated.

  4. Boil the syrup until it becomes ropy.

Flavor and seal

  1. Pour the ropy syrup into jars with the citron.

  2. Flavor the syrup with extract of ginger.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of extract of lemon peel to each quart jar.

  4. Seal the jars immediately with paper wet in egg.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Melon + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Melon + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Citron melons
Forms the firm, bulky fruit that holds its shape and absorbs the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, concentrated in the syrup, preserves it by drawing out water.
Water
Dissolves the sugar to make the syrup that the citron soaks in.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it becomes ropy. Boiling concentrates the sugar so the syrup is thick enough to preserve the fruit. Too little boiling leaves it dilute and prone to spoiling; the sugar must fully penetrate the citron during soaking.

Swap the melon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Melonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, lemon. 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.

More preserved citron recipes

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