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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges and lemons boiled 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 the oranges and lemons into quarters, then cut them thinly, discarding the ends.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Add an equal amount of water to the sliced fruit and boil until the skins are soft.

  2. Remove from heat and add 1.5 times as much sugar as the fruit, then cook until it jells.

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 fruit that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin, helping the marmalade thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it gel.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar after boiling. The sugar is added off the heat and the mixture is then cooked until it jells. Sugar and pectin need enough acid and concentration to form a gel, so cooking to the proper set point matters for a firm result.

“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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