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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made by boiling sliced lemons with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the lemons very thin.

  2. Pour the sliced lemons over the water and let stand overnight.

Cook

  1. The next morning, boil the mixture in the same water until the lemons are tender enough to mash.

  2. Add the sugar and continue to boil until the mixture is clear and rich-looking.

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

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

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

Lemons
Provide the bitter peel and tart juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and pectin for setting.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it dissolves and concentrates, helps it set into a thick spread.

The step that matters

Boiling until the mixture is clear and rich-looking. Sugar must be added to a fully softened lemon mixture and boiled long enough to concentrate. Too little boiling leaves the marmalade thin and runny, while overcooking can make it dark and sticky.

“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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