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Dessert

Preserved Oranges

A preserved orange dish made by boiling oranges, coating them in sugar syrup, and filling with a sweetened almond mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Biscuit and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 388 recipes. Both carry nonanal, which smells fat, citrus. The science ↓

Preserved Oranges

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Boil the oranges in fresh water until tender, changing the water to remove bitterness.

  2. Make a thin syrup with fine sugar and boil the oranges in it, turning them to coat.

Make the filling

  1. Mix sugar with the pulp and heat until boiling, then add 1 tablespoon of white wine for each orange. Stir in a bit of fresh butter to thicken the mixture.

Fill and serve

  1. Fill the oranges with the mixture and serve with some syrup in the dish.

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. Biscuit + almondtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  2. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Almond + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Orange + biscuittop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Biscuit + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide the main body, flavour and aromatic peel of the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the oranges and syrup and helps preserve the fruit.
Butter
Adds richness and helps thicken the filling as it melts into the mixture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the filling and add richness through their setting proteins and fat.

The step that matters

Changing the boiling water. Boiling the oranges in fresh water until tender, with the water changed, draws out bitterness from the peel. Skipping the change leaves the peel bitter.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (biscuit, almond, egg, sugar, butter):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against biscuit, almond, egg, sugar, butter. 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 orange recipes

Peel 15Custard 4Filling 4

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