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 ↓
Recipes for Orange Marmalade
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Cut the oranges and lemons into halves or quarters.
Use a glass lemon squeezer to extract all the juice into a basin.
Strain the juice to remove the seeds and place the seeds in a muslin bag.
Finely slice the remaining fruit and add it to the basin with the muslin bag.
Add the water to the sliced fruit and let it sit overnight.
Remove the muslin bag, squeezing out all the juice from it.
Cook and set
Boil the mixture until the peel is tender.
Add the juice and sugar to the fruit and boil for one hour or until it jellies when cooled.
Test a small amount in a saucer.
Jar
Prepare hot, dry jars and fill them with the boiling marmalade, sealing immediately.
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.
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Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairsSmell alikestrongCooked together10,634 recipes
Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Seville oranges
- Provide the bitter peel, juice and pectin-rich seeds that give marmalade its flavour and set.
- Lemons
- Add extra acidity and pectin, helping the marmalade set and balancing sweetness.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled with the fruit, helps it set into a gel.
The step that matters
Testing for the set. Marmalade sets as its pectin and acid combine with sugar at a high enough concentration. Boiling too briefly leaves it runny, while overboiling can make it stiff, so testing a cooled sample on a saucer shows whether it has reached a 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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