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Dessert

Preserved Oranges

A dish of boiled oranges coated in a sweet syrup and filled with a sugar‑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, then drain to remove bitterness.

  2. Make a thin syrup with fine sugar.

  3. Place the oranges in the syrup, boiling gently while turning them to coat.

Make the filling

  1. Mix sugar with the pulp.

  2. Heat the mixture over the fire until boiling.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of white wine for each orange.

  4. Boil again.

  5. Stir in a bit of fresh butter to thicken.

  6. Fill the oranges with the mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve with some syrup in the dish.

  2. Garnish with bits of the pulp.

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
Form the edible shell and supply the bitter-sweet citrus flavour that defines the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and the filling and helps preserve the fruit.
Butter
Adds richness and helps thicken the filling as it is stirred in.

The step that matters

Boiling the oranges in fresh water, then draining. Bitter compounds in the peel and pith leach into hot water, so the first boil must be drained off to remove bitterness before the fruit is sweetened in syrup.

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 oranges recipes

in Jelly 18 See all 30 →

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