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Candied Fruits

Candied fruits are fruit pieces coated in boiled sugar syrup and allowed to harden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 163 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Candied Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Dip each lump of sugar into a bowl of water.

  2. Place the sugar in a preserving pan.

  3. Boil the sugar down and skim until perfectly clear and ready to form crystals.

Candy the fruit

  1. Prepare the fruit by wiping it carefully without wetting it.

  2. Dip the fruit in the hot sugar mixture and let it sit for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the fruit and place it on oiled plates or paper to harden.

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. Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together163 recipes

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

  2. Pineapple + plumtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together147 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol (fusel, malty).

  3. Pineapple + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together168 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Grape + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Grape + plumtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together238 recipes

    Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Loaf sugar
Forms the syrup that coats the fruit and hardens into a sweet, glossy shell.
Fruits
Provide the flavour and body of the candied pieces once coated in syrup.

The step that matters

Boil the sugar down and skim until perfectly clear. Sugar syrup must reach the right concentration to set into a crisp coating as it cools. Undercooked syrup stays sticky, while overcooked syrup turns grainy or brown. Skimming removes impurities that would cloud the coating.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, grape, orange, pineapple, peach, plum):

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, grape, orange, pineapple, peach, plum. 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.

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