Skip to main content
Dessert

Time Preserves

A preserve made by boiling limes with sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lime and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,332 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Time Preserves

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the limes

  1. Weigh the limes and set aside double their weight in loaf sugar.

  2. Pierce the rind of the limes with a pin or straw.

  3. Boil the limes, changing the water once or twice.

  4. When the limes are cold, slice them and remove the pips.

Make the preserve

  1. Boil the sugar with 1 pint of water for every 5 cups of sugar until it forms a clear syrup.

  2. Pour the boiling syrup over the lime slices and let it stand for two days and nights.

  3. Boil the mixture together for 10 to 15 minutes, then pour into pots.

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. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Limes
Provide the main flavour and the rind, which is softened by boiling and piercing.
Loaf sugar
Preserves the fruit and sweetens it, forming a thick syrup as it dissolves.

The step that matters

Boiling the limes in changed water. Repeated boiling softens the rind and draws out some bitterness, so the peel becomes tender enough to eat in the finished preserve.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes