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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling oranges and lemons with sugar until clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Boil the oranges and lemons in water for 2 to 3 hours.

  2. Discard the water and open the fruits, removing seeds while preserving all pulp and juice.

  3. Cut the rinds into small strips or chop them; strips are preferred.

  4. Weigh the mixture of pulp and juice.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Add 3 pounds of sugar for every 2 pounds of pulp and boil slowly until clear.

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
Supply the pulp, juice and rinds, whose peel adds pectin and bitterness.
Lemons
Add acidity and pectin, which helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a gel by binding water.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar and boiling slowly until clear. Sugar, acid and pectin from the peel and seeds must be concentrated by boiling to form a gel. Too little cooking leaves the marmalade runny, while overly rough boiling can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour.

“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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