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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, lemons, and grapefruit boiled with water and sugar.

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

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Select fresh fruit and slice very thin, including the skins, omitting part of the grapefruit rind.

  2. Measure the sliced fruit and add three times the amount of water.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Cook and add sugar

  1. Bring to a boil and cook for 10 minutes.

  2. Let it stand for another 24 hours.

  3. Measure the mixture again and add an equal amount of sugar.

  4. Boil until it jellies.

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. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

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

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

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

Oranges
Provide the bulk of the fruit, along with their pectin-rich peel and pith.
Lemon
Adds acidity and pectin, which helps the marmalade set.
Grapefruit
Adds bitterness and extra pectin from its rind and pith.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a gel when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Setting depends on pectin, acid and sugar reaching the right concentration. Boiling too briefly leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or caramelised.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Grapefruitthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, 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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