Skip to main content
Dessert

Vegetable Marrow Jam

A jam made from vegetable marrow, sugar, lemon, ginger, cayenne pepper, and whisky.

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

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Jam

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the marrow and remove the seeds, then cut it into thick square pieces.

Cook

  1. In a pot, combine the marrow, sugar, lemon juice, lemon peel, bruised ginger, and cayenne pepper.

  2. Boil gently for 1.5 hours.

  3. When nearly done, add the whisky.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Ginger + whiskytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together163 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Vegetable marrow
Forms the bulk of the jam and gives its body and soft, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the jam while it thickens into a spreadable set.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps pectin set the jam.
Ginger
Contributes a warm, spicy aroma that carries through the long simmer.
Whisky
Adds a rich aroma; added near the end so its fragrance is not lost to heat.

The step that matters

Adding the whisky near the end. Alcohol and its aromatic compounds evaporate with prolonged heat, so adding the whisky only when the jam is nearly done helps keep its flavour noticeable in the finished jam.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger, pepper, whisky):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Cherryfits less well
  4. Orangefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, pepper, whisky. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes