Skip to main content
Dessert

To Preserve Orange and Lemon Peel

A preserve made by boiling orange and lemon rinds in sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 and Lemon Peel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rinds

  1. Squeeze the juice from the oranges and lemons and remove the insides.

  2. Soak the rinds in cold water for 3 to 4 days, changing the water daily.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. In a clean saucepan, combine loaf sugar and enough water to make a thin syrup.

  2. Boil the rinds in the syrup for 2 to 3 hours, then simmer gently.

  3. Transfer the rinds to a basin and simmer again the next day for 1 hour.

  4. If the syrup is not thick enough, add more sugar.

Store

  1. Store the rinds in a jar; they are ready for use once done.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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
Their peel provides the bitter, aromatic rind that is candied into the preserve.
Lemons
Their peel adds sharp, aromatic citrus flavour to the candied rinds.
Loaf sugar
Sugar syrup penetrates the rinds, sweetening them and preserving them as they thicken.

The step that matters

Simmering the rinds in the syrup. Simmering gently keeps the rinds intact while sugar slowly replaces the water in them. Boiling hard can break the rinds apart and make the syrup cloudy or uneven.

“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

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes