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Dessert

Scotch Marmalade

A citrus marmalade made from oranges and lemons, boiled with 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 ↓

Scotch Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut each orange and lemon into 4 pieces and shred finely, removing seeds.

  2. Soak the seeds in a little water and add to the fruit.

  3. Cut the yellow rind into strips and mince finely.

  4. For every pound of shredded fruit, add 3 pints of cold water and let it stand for 24 hours.

Boil and set

  1. Boil the mixture until tender, then let it stand until the next day.

  2. Weigh the boiled fruit and add 1.5 lbs of loaf sugar for every pound of fruit.

  3. Boil until it jellies and the chips are transparent, about 20 to 30 minutes.

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-sweet peel and pulp that give marmalade its body and flavour.
Lemons (seville)
Add natural pectin and acidity that help the marmalade set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it gel.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies. Pectin and acid from the fruit and seeds set the marmalade only when enough sugar is dissolved and boiled to the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves it runny; boiling too long can darken it and make it stiff.

“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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