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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from orange peel, pulp, and sugar, sometimes with lemon or grapefruit juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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. Grate the yellow peel off half the oranges.

  2. Peel the other half and cut it into small strips.

  3. Boil the cut peel in three different waters until tender.

  4. Remove all the tough white skin.

  5. Cut the pulp into small pieces.

  6. Put the pulp in a colander.

  7. Let the juice run through onto the sugar.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the sugar for about 10 minutes, adding a little water if necessary.

  2. Skim well.

  3. Add the pulp and grated peel.

  4. Boil for 6 minutes.

  5. Add the cut peel.

  6. Boil for an additional 15 minutes.

  7. If the oranges are very sweet, add the juice of 2-3 lemons or grapefruit before cooking.

  8. Pour into jelly glasses.

  9. Let it age.

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. Orange + sugartop 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

Oranges
Peel and pulp supply the bitter aroma, pectin and body that give marmalade its texture.
Sugar
Sweetens and, when boiled, helps the marmalade thicken and keep well.
Lemons or grapefruit
Add acidity and extra pectin, sharpening flavour and helping the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Boil the peel until tender before adding the sugar-juice mixture. Peel left tough or undercooked stays chewy in the finished marmalade. Thorough softening in several changes of water removes bitterness and lets the strips become tender enough to eat.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, 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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