Name: Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly
Ingredients: Oranges or lemons; Double-refined sugar (2 pounds for every pound of fruit); Water (1 pint for every 2 pounds of sugar); Juice of the orange; Peel and juice of a lemon; Green pippins (optional)

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 ↓

Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

Ingredients

Oranges or lemons
Double-refined sugar (2 pounds for every pound of fruit)
Water (1 pint for every 2 pounds of sugar)
Juice of the orange
Peel and juice of a lemon
Green pippins (optional)

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Cut a hole in the stalk of each orange or lemon, the size of a shilling.
Scrape out the pulp without cutting the rind.
Tie each fruit in muslin.
Soak the fruit in spring water for two days, changing the water daily.
Boil the fruit until tender in water over a slow fire.

Make the syrup

Boil together 1 pint of water and 2 pounds of double-refined sugar with the juice of the orange until it forms a syrup.
Clarify the syrup.
Skim the syrup well.
Let the syrup cool.

Preserve and store

Boil the fruit in the syrup until tender.
Drain the syrup from the fruit.
Pour the syrup over the fruit in a jar.
Cover with brandy paper.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Oranges or lemons: Provide the fruit that is cooked until tender and preserved whole in syrup.
Double-refined sugar: Forms the syrup that sweetens the fruit and preserves it.
Water: Dissolves the sugar into syrup and softens the fruit during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit until tender before adding syrup. Cooking the rind in plain water first softens it and reduces bitterness. If the fruit is not tender, the thick sugar syrup will keep the rind firm and tough, and the fruit will not soften evenly in the jar.

“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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Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly