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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from boiled Seville oranges, sugar, and water, with grated peel and pulp.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Boil the oranges until tender enough for a pin to pierce the skin.

  2. Grate half of the oranges to reduce bitterness.

  3. Cut the boiled oranges in half.

  4. Remove all the seeds.

  5. Scoop out the pulp.

  6. Cut the skins into thin strips.

Make the marmalade

  1. Dissolve the sugar in 1½ pints of water in a preserving jar and boil for 20 minutes.

  2. Skim the syrup well until clear.

  3. Add the pulp and strips of peel to the syrup and boil for 15 minutes.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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
Their peel and pulp supply the bitter flavour and pectin that help the marmalade set.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it set and keeps it preserved.
Water
Dissolves the sugar into a syrup that the fruit cooks in.

The step that matters

Skim the syrup well until clear. Skimming removes foam and cloudy particles from the dissolved sugar, so the finished marmalade looks clear rather than murky.

“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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

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