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Preserve

Preserved Orang’es

Preserved oranges are sweet oranges cooked with sugar and water, then set in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Orang’es

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Place the oranges in a jar and cover them with cold water.

  2. Cook slowly for 15 minutes, then pour away the water.

  3. Add fresh water and return the jar to a cool oven; cook until soft.

Make the preserve

  1. Cut the oranges into small pieces and place them in a pan with their weight in sugar and the juice.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes or until it sets.

Jar and cover

  1. Pour into jars and cover with tissue paper brushed with egg white.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Sweet oranges
Provide the fruit, peel and pectin that form the body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and helps it thicken and set as it boils.

The step that matters

Boil until it sets. Sugar and pectin from the fruit form a gel only at the right concentration. Boiling too briefly leaves a runny preserve, while overboiling can darken and toughen it.

“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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