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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemon, and sugar, cooked with peel and rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Juice the lemon and grate its rind.

  2. Weigh the oranges and use 3/4 pound of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  3. Remove the peel from the oranges in quarters and boil it in plenty of water until tender.

  4. Drain the water and let the peel cool.

Make the marmalade

  1. Remove the seeds and as much of the white skin as possible from the pulp.

  2. Boil the pulp with the sugar until well cooked.

  3. Once the peel is cool, cut out the white pith from the rind, leaving the yellow part.

  4. Cut the yellow rind into thin shreds.

  5. Add the shredded rinds to the cooked oranges and cook until thick but not solid like jelly.

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
Supply the pulp and peel, which give the marmalade its body, bitterness and aroma.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cools.
Lemon
Adds acidity that supports pectin setting and brightens the flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking until thick but not solid. The marmalade thickens further as it cools because sugar and pectin set together. Cooking too long makes it stiff and rubbery, while stopping too early leaves it runny and unable to set.

“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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