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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved fruit spread made from oranges, grapefruit, lemon, 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. Remove seeds and cores from the orange, grapefruit, and lemon, then chop the fruit using a meat chopper.

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

Soak overnight

  1. Let the mixture stand in an earthen bowl overnight.

  2. The next morning, boil the mixture for 10 minutes.

  3. Let it stand another night.

Boil and set

  1. In the morning, add an equal amount of sugar to the fruit mixture and boil until it jells.

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. Grapefruit + lemontop 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

Orange
Peel, pulp and pith supply pectin and acidity that help the marmalade set.
Grapefruit
Adds pectin and bitter, acidic flavour that balances the sweetness of the sugar.
Lemon
Adds acidity and pectin, which help the mixture thicken into a gel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps the mixture gel when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil until it jells. Sugar, pectin and acid must reach the gel point together. Boiling too little leaves the marmalade runny, while boiling too long over-concentrates the sugar and can make it stiff or grainy.

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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