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Dessert

Suedotse of Peaches

A preserved peach dessert made with syrup, marmalade, and garnished with kernels and macaroons.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Peach and lemon work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 947 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Suedotse of Peaches

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peaches

  1. Pare and divide the 4 peaches.

  2. Immerse them in a syrup made with ⅓ cup water and 3 ounces sugar, boiled for 15 minutes, for 5 to 8 minutes.

  3. Carefully lift the peaches into a deep dish and pour half the syrup over them.

Make the marmalade

  1. For the marmalade, boil 2 pounds of ripe peaches with additional sugar until smooth and dry.

  2. Lift the other peaches from the syrup and reduce the syrup by boiling it quickly until more than half is gone.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread a layer of marmalade in a dish, arrange the peaches around it, and fill spaces with more marmalade.

  2. Place half a blanched peach kernel in each peach, pour the reduced syrup over the surface, and border with macaroons or candied citron.

  3. Add a little lemon juice to enhance the flavor, if desired.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  2. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Peaches
Provide the main fruit flavor, body and texture of the marmalade and the dish.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and marmalade and helps thicken the marmalade as it reduces.
Water
Forms the syrup that poaches the peaches and carries sweetness into the fruit.

The step that matters

Reducing the syrup. Boiling the syrup quickly until more than half has evaporated concentrates its sugar, so it becomes glossy and flavorful rather than thin and watery when poured back over the peaches.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (peach, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against peach, sugar. 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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