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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from sliced oranges, water, sugar, and lemon juice.

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

  1. Wash and slice the oranges very thin.

  2. Add the sliced oranges to 3 pints of water and let stand overnight.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture in the same water until the oranges are tender.

  2. Add 1 ¼ pounds of sugar for each pint of fruit and boil slowly for 1 hour and 45 minutes.

  3. Add the juice of 4 lemons and boil for an additional 15 minutes.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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
Supply the peel and pulp that give marmalade its body, bitterness, and natural pectin.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with heat, helps it thicken into a spreadable set.
Lemons
Add acidity that balances sweetness and helps the pectin set.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar after the fruit is tender. Sugar added to fruit that is not yet soft can toughen the peel and slow softening. Once the fruit is tender, sugar and acid together help pectin gel as the mixture reaches setting point.

“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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