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Preserve

Citron Preserves

Citron preserves are made by boiling citron with alum, sugar, lemons, and ginger, then cooking with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and ginger 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 ↓

Citron Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the citron

  1. Pare, slice, and cut the citron into desired shapes.

  2. Boil the citron in weak alum-water for 20 minutes.

  3. Scald the citron in clear water for another 20 minutes.

  4. Drain the water from the fruit.

Make the preserves

  1. Add 1¼ pounds of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  2. Boil 2 lemons and some white ginger separately.

  3. Add only the liquid from the boiled lemons and ginger to the fruit.

  4. Cook the fruit until tender.

  5. Boil the syrup until thick.

  6. Pour the syrup over the fruit.

Jar

  1. Transfer the preserves to jars.

  2. Seal the jars tightly.

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. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

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

  3. 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
Forms the main body of the preserve and becomes tender and translucent as it cooks in syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup, helping preserve the fruit.
Alum
Firms the citron's texture during the initial boiling in weak alum-water.
Lemons
Adds acidity and flavor through their boiled liquid added to the fruit.

The step that matters

Boil the syrup until thick. Sugar must be concentrated enough to thicken and preserve the fruit. Undercooked syrup stays thin and may not keep well in the jars.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger. 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.

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