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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges and apples with sugar and water, boiled and cooled into jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 oranges

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

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

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

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

  5. The day before, soak the orange peel in water overnight.

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

Prepare the apples

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

  2. Run the apple pulp through a colander into a preserving kettle.

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

Combine and finish

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

  2. In another kettle, simmer the orange peel with the apple pulp and 2 pounds of sugar.

  3. When both mixtures are nearly done, combine them and cook until thick.

  4. 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 flavor.
Apples
Add pectin and body, helping the marmalade set to a thick texture.
Sugar
Sweetens and helps the marmalade thicken and keep as a preserve.

The step that matters

Soak and boil the orange peel in changes of water. Peel is bitter and tough; soaking and repeatedly changing the water draws out bitterness and softens the peel so it becomes tender rather than chewy.

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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