Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sweet and bitter oranges, sugar, and water, cooked until jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Bitter orange and orange work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23 recipes. Both carry acetal, which smells cream, earthy. The science ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Weigh the oranges and note the total weight.

  2. Cover the fruit with cold water.

  3. Bring to a boil.

  4. Drain the water.

  5. Add fresh water (1 pint for every pound of oranges).

  6. Boil until the skin is tender.

  7. Let it cool.

  8. Slice the fruit thinly.

  9. Remove the pips.

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine the fruit, sugar, and water in a preserving pan.

  2. Cook for about one hour, or until the marmalade jellies.

Jar and store

  1. Pour into jars.

  2. Cover when cold.

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. Bitter orange + orangetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetal (cream, earthy).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  3. Bitter orange + sugartop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14 recipes

Sugar and orange 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

Sweet and bitter oranges
Provide the fruit, peel, and pectin that give marmalade its body and bitter flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a firm, jellied texture.
Water
Softens the peel during boiling and helps the marmalade reach a spreadable consistency.

The step that matters

Cook until the marmalade jellies. Setting depends on pectin, acid and sugar reaching the right concentration. Undercooking leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

Swap the bitter orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, orange):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bitter orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange. 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.

More orange marmalade recipes

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

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipesOrange GelatinOrange Gelatin100 recipesOrange SherbetOrange Sherbet73 recipes