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Dessert

Inexpensive Lemon Marmalade

A preserved lemon spread made by boiling lemon slices with water, then adding sugar and more liquid until it gels.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Inexpensive Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the lemons

  1. Quarter the lemons and remove the seeds.

  2. Slice each quarter as thin as possible, including the peel and pulp.

  3. Combine the sliced lemons with 3 pints of cold water in an earthenware pan and let it sit for 24 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture until the peel is tender, about 45 minutes.

  2. Strain through a colander and weigh the remaining pulp.

  3. For every pound of pulp, add 1¼ pounds of sugar and 1 pint of the strained liquid.

  4. Boil for another 45 minutes, skimming off any scum.

  5. Test a small amount on a plate; if it jellies when cooled, it's done. If not, continue boiling.

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

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

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

Lemons
Provide the peel and pulp, whose pectin helps the marmalade set to a jelly.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with heat, helps it set into a firm jelly.

The step that matters

Testing for set. Marmalade sets because pectin and acid, concentrated by boiling with sugar, form a gel as it cools. Stopping too early leaves a runny result, so test a cooled spoonful on a plate before removing the pan from heat.

“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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