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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, sweet oranges, lemons, water, sugar, and optional spirits, boiled until jelly consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the oranges and lemons across the grain as finely as possible.

  2. Place the fruit in a deep dish with 4 quarts of water and let it stand for 36 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture for 2 hours, adding more water as needed.

  2. Add 8 pounds of crushed sugar and boil for 1 hour longer, or until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  3. If desired, add ⅓ cup of spirits near the end of boiling to clarify the jelly.

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. Orange + spirittop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together171 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pectin that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set into a jelly.
Lemons
Add acidity and additional pectin, supporting the jelly set and balancing sweetness.

The step that matters

Boiling until the jelly sets. Marmalade sets when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration. Undercooking leaves it runny, while overcooking can darken and bitter the flavor. Testing for a jelly consistency shows when it is ready.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

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

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