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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar simmered until thick.

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 the fruit

  1. Grind the oranges and lemons through a meat chopper, discarding the seeds.

Cook and set

  1. Add 2 quarts of water and simmer uncovered for about 1½ hours until tender.

  2. Stir in 2½ quarts of sugar and boil until the mixture is quite thick.

  3. To test, place a small amount on a plate and let it cool.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pectin that give marmalade its body and sharp flavour.
Lemons
Add acidity and additional pectin, helping the marmalade thicken and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling until thick. Marmalade sets when sugar, pectin and acid are concentrated enough by boiling. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff, so the cold-plate test helps judge the set.

“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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