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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sweet and bitter oranges, lemons, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Remove seeds from all fruits and place them in a separate dish covered with cold water.

  2. Let the seeds stand overnight.

  3. Boil the seeds for 10 minutes.

  4. Strain the seeds and add them to the oranges.

  5. Quarter the sweet oranges and mince them.

  6. Quarter the lemons and add them to the oranges (do not mince the lemons).

  7. Add 1 quart of cold water to the mixture and let it stand overnight.

  8. Boil the mixture for 2 hours.

  9. Cool the mixture and squeeze out the lemon peel.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every 4 pounds of juice, add 5 pounds of white sugar.

  2. Heat the mixture before adding the sugar.

  3. Boil for half an hour.

  4. Pour the marmalade into glasses.

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. Orange + bitter orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

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

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

  4. Bitter orange + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together21 recipes

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

  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

Bitter oranges
Their peel and pith add the characteristic bitter flavor and pectin for setting.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set by binding water and pectin.
Sweet oranges
Supply the main orange flavor and juice for the marmalade.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin to help the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 2 hours before adding sugar. Long simmering softens the peel and releases pectin from the fruit and seeds. Adding sugar too early can toughen the peel and slow its softening, so the marmalade may not set well.

Swap the bitter orange

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

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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