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Dessert

Orange Marmalade — No. 1

A preserved citrus spread made from oranges, lemons, and sugar, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 — No. 1

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel 4 oranges.

  2. Boil the peel until tender.

  3. Peel the remaining oranges.

  4. Divide the peeled oranges into sections.

  5. Remove seeds and stringy parts from the sections.

  6. Cut the orange sections into small pieces.

  7. Grate the yellow rind of 2 lemons.

  8. Squeeze the juice of all lemons.

  9. Add the lemon juice to the orange pulp.

  10. Remove the white part from the boiled orange peel.

  11. Finely shred the yellow part.

  12. Combine the shredded peel with the orange mixture.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Weigh the mixture.

  2. Add an equal weight of sugar to the mixture.

  3. Boil the pulp for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the sugar.

  5. Boil for 30 minutes, stirring constantly.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boil for 30 minutes, stirring constantly. Sugar must dissolve fully before a hard boil, and constant stirring prevents scorching on the base of the pan. The mixture must reach a firm set point, which depends on sugar, acid and pectin concentration together.

“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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