Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, and sugar boiled into a jelly-like consistency.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Thinly slice the oranges.

  2. Add the sliced oranges and water to a large pot and let it stand for 12 hours.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

  2. Add the sugar and let it stand overnight.

  3. Boil again until it reaches a jelly-like consistency.

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

Marmalade oranges
Supply the peel and pulp that give marmalade its bitter flavor and pectin for setting.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set into a jelly-like texture.
Water
Softens the sliced peel and draws out flavor and pectin before boiling.

The step that matters

Boil again until jelly-like. Sugar and pectin set the marmalade only at the right concentration; boiling too short leaves it runny, while overcooking can make it stiff or sugary.

“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

You might also like