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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville orange pulp and clarified sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Scoop out the pulp of Seville oranges into a fine sieve.

  2. Beat the pulp.

  3. Press the juice into a pan below.

  4. Boil the skins in water until tender.

  5. Remove the white part of the skins.

  6. Cut the skins into small strips.

  7. Add the strips to the juice.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add an equal weight of clarified sugar for each pound of fruit.

  2. Boil the mixture for about 30 minutes until it reaches the feather stage.

  3. Remove from heat.

  4. Stir well.

  5. Boil again until it hangs to the spoon, known as the crack stage.

Pot and cover

  1. Pour into pots.

  2. Cover with paper dipped in brandy.

  3. Tie a bladder over it.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and juice that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
Clarified sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil again until it hangs to the spoon. Setting depends on reaching the right concentration of sugar and pectin. Too short a boil leaves the marmalade runny, while overboiling 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

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