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Dessert

Watermelon Preserves

Preserves made from watermelon rind boiled with sugar, water, lemon peel, and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Watermelon Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rind

  1. Cut the watermelon in half and remove the soft inside, leaving only the firm white rind.

  2. Cut the rind into desired shapes.

  3. Boil the rind pieces in enough water to cover them, adding fresh lemon peel for color.

  4. Once tender, place the rind in dishes to cool.

Make the preserves

  1. In a separate pot, combine 1 pound of sugar and 1 cup of water, and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the cooled watermelon rind and boil until the pieces are clear, adding slices of lemon for flavor.

  3. Once the rind is transparent, remove it with a skimmer.

  4. Continue boiling the syrup until thick, then pour it over the fruit.

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. 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

Watermelon rind
Forms the firm, tender pieces that hold their shape and turn clear in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the dish and, boiled into syrup, thickens and preserves the rind.

The step that matters

Boiling the rind in syrup until transparent. Boiling too briefly leaves the rind opaque and tough, while overcooking can make it soft and break apart. Sugar slowly penetrates the rind, which is why it turns clear as the syrup thickens.

“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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