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To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

A method of preserving oranges or lemons in a sweet jelly using sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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 ↓

To Preserve Oranges or Lemons in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut a hole in the stalk of each orange or lemon, the size of a shilling, and scrape out the pulp without cutting the rind.

  2. Tie each fruit in muslin and soak in spring water for two days, changing the water twice a day.

  3. Boil the fruit in water until tender on a slow fire.

Make the syrup

  1. Weigh two pounds of double-refined sugar and one pint of water for each pound of fruit.

  2. Boil the mixture with the juice of the orange to make a syrup.

  3. Clarify the syrup.

  4. Skim the syrup well.

  5. Let the syrup cool.

Preserve the fruit

  1. Boil the fruit in the syrup for half an hour.

  2. Repeat daily until the mixture is clear.

Make the apple jelly and finish

  1. Pare and core some green pippins.

  2. Boil the pippins in water until the flavor is strong.

  3. Press gently with a spoon.

  4. Strain the water through a jelly bag until clear.

  5. For each pint of strained water, add a pound of double-refined sugar, the peel, and juice of a lemon.

  6. Boil the mixture to a strong syrup.

  7. Drain the syrup from the fruit.

  8. Place each orange or lemon hole-up in a jar.

  9. Pour the apple jelly over the fruit.

  10. 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.

  1. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

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

  3. 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 whole fruit that is cooked and preserved in the clear syrup.
Double-refined sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit and set the jelly.
Green pippins
Their pectin-rich juice is used to make the apple jelly that sets the preserve.

The step that matters

Repeat the syrup boiling daily until clear. Boiling the fruit in syrup on several days lets the sugar slowly replace the water in the fruit, which keeps it clear and firm. Boiling it all at once would toughen or break the fruit.

“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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