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Dessert

Sweet Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sweet oranges, lemons, sugar, and water, simmered until the fruit is tender and the mixture thickens.

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 ↓

Sweet Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the rind of the oranges and lemons into quarters and peel it off.

  2. If a softer marmalade is desired, remove some of the spongy white skin inside the rind.

  3. Cut the rind into thin chips, about half an inch long, and divide the pulp into small bits, removing the seeds.

  4. Soak the seeds in part of the water for the marmalade.

Soak

  1. Put the chips and pulp into a pot and pour boiling water over them.

  2. Let the mixture sit for 12 to 14 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Transfer the mixture to a preserving pan and boil until the chips are tender.

  2. Gradually add the sugar and boil until it jellies.

  3. Strain the water from the soaked seeds through a sieve, pressing with a spoon to extract a clear jelly.

  4. Add this jelly to the fruit mixture when it first goes on the fire.

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

Sweet oranges
Provide the main flavor, bitter rind chips, and pectin-rich pulp that gives the marmalade body.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavor and helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps the marmalade gel.

The step that matters

Boil until it jellies after adding the sugar. Sugar is added gradually and the mixture must reach the gel point. Too little boiling leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking makes it stiff and dense as it cools.

“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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