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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from orange peel, pulp, lemon juice, and sugar, boiled until jellied.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the oranges and separate the white lining from the yellow rind.

  2. Cut the rind into fine shreds to fill 3 cups.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender, changing the water when it first boils.

  4. Cover the pulp with cold water.

  5. Boil the pulp until soft.

Make the marmalade

  1. Add the juice of the lemons and 3 cups of sugar to the pulp.

  2. Add the boiled rinds.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes or until jellied.

Finish

  1. Pour into glasses.

  2. Let cool.

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 flavor and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken into a jelly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boil for 20 minutes or until jellied. Sugar and pectin only set into a jelly at the right concentration, so underboiling leaves a runny marmalade while overboiling can make it dense and dull. Judge by a set test rather than the clock alone.

“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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