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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling oranges and lemons with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice and chop the oranges and lemons into fine pieces.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the fruit with 1 quart of cold water.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Cook and set

  1. The next morning, boil the mixture until the fruit is tender, then set aside.

  2. Weigh the fruit.

  3. Add 1.5 lbs of sugar for each pound of fruit.

  4. Boil until the orange pieces look clear and the syrup jellies.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Lemon and sugar 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

Oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pectin-rich pith that give marmalade its flavor and set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin, which help the marmalade gel.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled with the fruit, helps it set into a jelly.

The step that matters

Boil until the syrup jellies. Marmalade sets when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration during boiling. Stopping too early leaves a runny spread, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

“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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