Skip to main content
Dessert

Watermelon or Muskmelon Marmalade

A marmalade made from watermelon or muskmelon rind, sugar, and citrus peelings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Watermelon or Muskmelon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the rind

  1. Soak the rind in fresh water to remove salt after brining.

  2. Parboil the rind until tender.

Make the marmalade

  1. Make a thin syrup with 12 pounds of sugar and add the rind.

  2. Boil the mixture until the rind breaks apart.

  3. Add the soft peelings of the oranges and lemons, cut into strips.

  4. Stir constantly with a spatula while cooking until thick.

  5. Transfer to wide-mouthed glass jars.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Watermelon or muskmelon rind
Provides the bulk of the marmalade and becomes tender and translucent when cooked in syrup.
Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the marmalade and thickens it as the liquid reduces.
Orange peelings
Adds bitter aromatic oils and a citrus flavor that balances the sweetness.
Lemon peelings
Adds acidity and aromatic citrus oils that brighten the flavor and help set the jelly.

The step that matters

Stir constantly while cooking until thick. Sugar-rich mixtures scorch easily on the bottom of the pan, and constant stirring keeps the heat even. Cooking until the mixture thickens lets the sugar concentrate enough to set as it cools.

“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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes