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Plain Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from oranges and lemons boiled with water and sugar until it gels.

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 ↓

Plain Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut the oranges and lemons finely.

  2. Cook them in 3 quarts of water for 30 minutes.

  3. Add 3 quarts of sugar and cook for another 30 minutes or until it jell.

  4. If the orange peel is too bitter, only use the grated yellow part.

  5. Ensure no seeds are included.

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
Peel supplies bitterness and aroma, while the fruit and seeds supply natural pectin for setting.
Lemons
Acidity helps pectin set and brightens the sweetness of the marmalade.
Sugar
Sweetness, and it helps the pectin form a gel as the mixture thickens.

The step that matters

Cooking until it jells. Marmalade sets when pectin, acid and sugar are in balance and the mixture is hot enough to gel. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can darken it and make it overly 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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