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 ↓
Another Wat to Make Orangb Marmalade
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the oranges
Wash the oranges and remove any defective parts.
Place the oranges in a saucepan with plenty of cold water, cover, and boil until easily pierced.
Remove the oranges from the saucepan.
Cut the oranges into quarters, pick out the seeds, and slice them thinly, skin and all.
Make the orange syrup
Break the sugar into small pieces.
For each pound of sugar, add ¼ pint of water.
Stir the sugar and water until dissolved.
Boil the sugar and water mixture for a few minutes.
Add ¼ pint of cold water to the mixture to remove any scum.
Skim off the scum.
Add the sliced oranges to the mixture and boil for 15 minutes.
Prepare the lemons
Use 18 ounces of sugar for the lemons.
Prepare the lemon mixture as with the oranges.
Grate the rind of a few lemons.
Cut the lemons in half.
Squeeze out the juice.
Boil the lemon skins in the same way as the oranges.
Scoop out the pulp and white part.
Cut half of the lemon skins into thin chips.
Pound the other half of the lemon skins.
Finish and jar
Combine the pounded sugar with the lemon juice and boil for 5 minutes.
Skim off any scum.
Add the lemon chips and pounded skins.
Boil for another 5 minutes.
Add the grated peel.
Boil for 5 more minutes.
Remove from heat.
Stir until half cold.
Transfer to jars.
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.
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Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together10,634 recipes
Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,212 recipes
Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
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
- Oranges
- Their thinly sliced skin and flesh provide the bitter peel texture and pectin-rich body of the marmalade.
- Fine loaf sugar
- Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, thickens it into a preserve that sets as it cools.
- Lemons
- Add acidity and extra pectin, helping the marmalade set and balancing the sweetness.
The step that matters
Skimming the scum. Scum rising during the boil contains impurities that can cloud the marmalade and spoil its clarity, so it should be skimmed off before the fruit is added and again after the lemon juice goes in.
“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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