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Preserve

Elderberry Preserve

A preserve made by cooking elderberries with lemon juice, rind, sugar, and water until jelly consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Elderberry Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Make a syrup by combining the lemon juice, grated rind, and as little water as possible.

  2. Skim the syrup if necessary.

Cook and fill the jars

  1. Add the elderberries and cook for 20 minutes.

  2. Strain the berries into jars or glasses.

  3. Boil the syrup until it reaches a jelly consistency and pour it over the fruit until the jar is full.

Cover the jars

  1. Cover the jars after 24 hours. If using an open-mouthed jar, place a piece of thin paper over it and tie a cloth or thick paper cover.

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

Elderberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and the body of the preserve.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, once concentrated, helps the preserve set and keep.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup to a jelly consistency. Sugar and fruit set only when the syrup reaches roughly the concentration needed for gelling. Stopping early leaves the preserve runny, while boiling too long makes it stiff and can cause sugar to crystallise.

“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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