Skip to main content
Dessert

Preserved Citron

Preserved citron is a sweetened, jarred fruit preserved in syrup with ginger and lemon peel.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Preserved Citron

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the citron

  1. Pare the citron melons and cut them into half-moon shaped pieces, about ½ inch thick.

  2. Boil the pieces in soda water until tender.

  3. Skim them out and lay them in weak alum water for 3 hours.

  4. Transfer them to cold water for another hour.

Make the syrup

  1. Combine 1 quart of water and 4 pounds of sugar in a pot.

  2. Boil the syrup and remove any scum.

  3. Add the citron to the clear syrup and let it soak until the sugar has penetrated thoroughly.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the citron in jars and boil the syrup until it is ropy.

  2. Pour the syrup into the jars, flavor with extract of ginger, and add 1 tablespoon of extract of lemon peel to each jar.

  3. Seal the jars immediately with paper wet in egg.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Melon + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together342 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  3. Melon + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together362 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Citron melons
Forms the bulk of the preserve and becomes translucent and tender as it absorbs the syrup.
Sugar
Preserves the fruit and sweetens it, drawing water out and thickening the syrup as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until it is ropy. Sugar concentration determines how well the preserve keeps and how thick the syrup becomes. Boiling until the syrup forms strands concentrates the sugar enough to help preserve the fruit, so stopping early leaves it prone to spoiling.

Swap the melon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, ginger, lemon):

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Melonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More preserved citron recipes

Melon 10 See all 34 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesGinger CookiesGinger Cookies213 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes