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Dessert

Lemon Marmalade

A preserved lemon and sugar mixture made by boiling lemon peel, pulp, and juice with sugar and water.

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 ↓

Lemon Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Wash the lemons well and peel them.

  2. Boil the peel until tender.

  3. Quarter the lemons.

  4. Remove the pulp.

  5. Add the pulp to the juice.

  6. Cut the boiled peel into very thin slices.

Make the marmalade

  1. Melt the sugar in the water over heat.

  2. Add the lemons.

  3. Boil for about 1 hour or until thick.

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 for bitterness and the pulp and juice for acidity and pectin.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it thickens, helps it set into a spreadable texture.
Water
Dissolves the sugar and helps the mixture cook evenly before it thickens.

The step that matters

Boil until thick. Lemons contain natural pectin, and the mixture must reach a high enough sugar concentration and temperature to set. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while over-boiling can make it stiff and dark.

“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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