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Dessert

Grape Fruit Marmalade

A marmalade made from grapefruit, orange, and lemon with sugar and water, boiled and jellied over several days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Grape Fruit Marmalade

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 ↓

Grape Fruit Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the grapefruit, orange, and lemon very finely and thin, removing seeds.

  2. Measure the fruit and add three times the amount of water.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture for 5 minutes.

  2. Let it stand overnight again.

  3. Add 1 cup of sugar for each cup of the mixture.

  4. Boil until it jellies, about 2 hours.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Grapefruit + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Grapefruit + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. 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

Grapefruit
Provides the main bitter flavour and pectin-rich peel that helps the marmalade set.
Orange
Adds sweet-tart citrus aroma and more pectin to help the marmalade gel.
Lemon
Adds acidity, which helps pectin set and brightens the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with heat and acid, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Marmalade sets when enough sugar, acid and pectin reach the right concentration during boiling. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dark.

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, lemon, sugar):

  1. Grapefruitthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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