Name: Marmalade Water
Ingredients: 2 tablespoons orange marmalade; 2 cups boiling water; 1½ cups boiling water; juice of ½ lemon

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 ↓

Marmalade Water

Ingredients

2 tablespoons orange marmalade
2 cups boiling water
1½ cups boiling water
juice of ½ lemon

Directions

Make the marmalade water

Place the orange marmalade in a jug, pour 2 cups of boiling water over it, and stir well.
Add 1½ cups of boiling water, stir, and allow to cool.

Strain and serve

When cold, strain through muslin and serve.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Orange marmalade: Provides the main orange flavour and sweetness, which the boiling water draws out and dissolves.
Boiling water: Dissolves the marmalade and carries its flavour into a thin, drinkable liquid.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the marmalade.

“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.