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Golden Pippins Preſerved

A method for preserving golden pippins in a sugar syrup with orange peel and lemon juice.

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

Golden Pippins Preſerved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Boil the pippins in water until soft.

  2. Strain the liquid through a jelly bag.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 2 pounds of sugar with 1 pint of water in a pan.

  2. Boil and skim the mixture.

  3. Add the prepared pippins and orange peel to the syrup.

  4. Boil until the syrup thickens.

Cook the pippins

  1. Remove the pippins when they start to fall apart.

  2. Return them to the heat after resting.

  3. Stir in the pippin juice.

  4. Boil until the pippins are clear.

  5. Adjust the syrup thickness as needed.

  6. Add lemon juice to taste.

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

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

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

Pippins
Main fruit that softens and turns clear as it cooks in the syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and thickens into a syrup that preserves it.
Pippin juice
Adds fruit flavour and body to the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup.
Orange peel
Adds a citrus aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Remove the pippins when they start to fall apart. Pippins keep softening in hot syrup, so waiting too long turns them mushy. Pulling them out at the first sign of breaking keeps them whole and clear while the syrup thickens around them.

“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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