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Dessert

Amber Marmalade

A marmalade made from grapefruit, orange, and lemon, sweetened with sugar and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Amber Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the pulp, skin, and all of the grapefruit, orange, and lemon very finely, discarding the seeds and cores, or use a food chopper.

  2. Cover the sliced fruits with 5 pints of water and let stand overnight.

Cook and set

  1. In the morning, cook the mixture until the pulp and skins are tender.

  2. Add 5 pints of sugar and cook until the mixture jellies.

  3. Seal in glasses.

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. Grapefruit + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Grapefruit + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

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

  5. 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

Grapefruit
Its peel and pulp supply pectin and bitterness that help the marmalade set and give it flavour.
Orange
Its peel and pulp add pectin and a bright, slightly bitter citrus flavour.
Lemon
Its acidity and pectin help the marmalade gel and balance the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration with acid and pectin, helps it set into a jelly.

The step that matters

Cooking until the mixture jellies. Setting depends on sugar, acid and pectin reaching the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny syrup, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Grapefruitthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

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

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