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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, apples, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the oranges, removing all seeds and tough skin.

  2. Cut the peel into small pieces and boil in cold water until tender.

  3. Soak the orange peel in water overnight.

  4. Cut the pulp of the oranges into small pieces.

  5. Boil the soaked orange peel until soft, changing the water three times.

Make the marmalade

  1. Make a syrup with 1 pound sugar and 1 pint water.

  2. Mix 1 pound of oranges (with peel) into the syrup and boil for 2 hours.

  3. Weigh 6 pounds of apples, stew with a little water until soft, then set aside.

  4. Run the apple pulp through a sieve into a preserving kettle.

  5. Add 6 pounds of sugar to the apple pulp and boil slowly, scraping the bottom.

  6. Combine the orange pulp with the apple mixture and cook until thick.

Finish and store

  1. Cool in a bowl, then transfer to a glass jar with a screw top.

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 + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  2. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

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

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

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

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and aroma.
Apples
Add natural pectin that helps the marmalade set and thicken as it cooks.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it set and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boiling the peel until tender. Orange peel is tough and bitter; it must be boiled and the water changed until soft, because unsoftened peel stays chewy in the finished marmalade.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Pearfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, 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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