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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved citrus spread made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 and soak

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons very thin, discarding rough ends and seeds.

  2. Add 1.5 pints of water for each pound of fruit and let it stand for 24 hours.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil gently until the skins are tender.

  2. Let it stand for another 24 hours.

Add sugar and set

  1. For each pound of mixture, add 1.5 pounds of sugar.

  2. Cook until the syrup jellies and the skins are transparent.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

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
Their peel and pith supply pectin, which helps the marmalade set, and their peel gives bitter flavour.
Lemons
Their acidity and pectin help the marmalade gel and balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade, preserves it, and helps the syrup set into a jelly.

The step that matters

Cook until the syrup jellies. Pectin, sugar and acid must reach the right concentration to gel. Stopping too early leaves runny marmalade, while cooking too long 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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