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Dessert

Preserved Citron, Orange and Lemon Peel

A preserved citrus peel made by soaking, rinsing, boiling, and simmering in a sugar syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Preserved Citron, Orange and Lemon Peel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Soak the peel in a mixture of salt and water overnight.

  2. Rinse the peel in three changes of water to freshen it.

  3. Boil the peel in fresh water until tender.

Make the syrup and finish

  1. In a separate pot, make a syrup by boiling 1 pint of water with 1 pound of sugar.

  2. Add the tender peel to the syrup and boil for 30 minutes.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Citrus peel
Forms the candied body; soaking and boiling soften its tough, bitter texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the peel and, as it soaks into the peel, preserves it.

The step that matters

Boiling the peel until tender before syrup. Peel that is not fully softened stays tough and bitter, and sugar cannot penetrate it evenly. Testing for tenderness before adding the syrup helps the peel absorb the syrup uniformly.

“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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