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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, sugar, water, and egg whites, boiled until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 the fruit

  1. Weigh the oranges and use 1 lb of sugar for each lb of oranges.

  2. Pare the yellow rind from half of the oranges as thin as possible and place it in a pan with cold water.

  3. Cover the pan and boil the rind slowly until soft enough to pierce with a pin.

  4. Grate the rind from the remaining oranges and remove all pulp and juice, discarding seeds and core.

Make the marmalade

  1. In a preserving kettle, mix the sugar with ½ cup of water for each pound and add 1 egg white for every 2 lbs of sugar.

  2. Dissolve the sugar over heat, skimming until clear and thick.

  3. Pound the boiled parings into a paste and add to the sugar mixture, boiling and stirring for 10 minutes.

  4. Combine the paste with the orange pulp, juice, and grated rind, and boil all together for 30 minutes until transparent.

Store

  1. Once cooled, store in glass jars with brandy paper on top.

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).

  2. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. Orange + eggtop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Oranges
Provide the bitter peel, pulp and juice that give marmalade its flavour and set.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled thick, helps it set and preserves it.
Egg whites
Help clarify the syrup, lifting impurities that are skimmed off to leave it clear.

The step that matters

Boiling the rind until soft. Rind that is not fully softened stays tough and chewy in the finished marmalade. Slow boiling in covered water breaks down the peel's tough fibres, so it can be pierced easily before it is pounded and added.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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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