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To Preserve 'Orange or Lemons in Jelly

A method for preserving oranges or lemons in a sweet jelly using muslin, sugar, and brandy paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 'Orange or Lemons in Jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut a hole the size of a shilling in the stalk part of the oranges or lemons and scrape out the pulp without cutting the rind.

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

  3. Boil the fruit gently until tender.

Make the syrup and cook the fruit

  1. For the syrup, combine 1 pint of water and 2 pounds of double-refined sugar with the juice of the orange; boil until syrupy and clarify it.

  2. Boil the fruit in the syrup for half an hour; repeat daily until clear.

Make the jelly and pot

  1. Prepare green pippins by boiling them in water until the flavor is strong, then strain through a jelly bag until clear.

  2. For the jelly, combine 1 pint of the strained water with 1 pound of double-refined sugar, the peel, and juice of a lemon; boil to a strong syrup.

  3. Drain the syrup from the fruit, place the oranges or lemons hole-up in a jar, and pour the apple jelly over them.

  4. 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
The fruit being preserved, which becomes tender and takes on sweetness from the syrup.
Double-refined sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and preserves it, while building the syrup and jelly sweetness.
Green pippins
Unripe apples rich in pectin, which helps the strained liquid set into a jelly.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity, which supports pectin setting and brightens the flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit in the syrup daily until clear. Sugar must penetrate the fruit gradually over repeated boilings. Rushing this leaves the fruit cloudy and less preserved, and the sugar gradually replaces water in the tissue, keeping the fruit firm and clear.

“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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