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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar, boiled until jellied.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Rub the oranges and lemons with a rough towel.

  2. Divide the fruit lengthwise into quarters, remove seeds, and cut into thin slices.

  3. Weigh the fruit and add 3 pints of cold water for each pound of fruit.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture until the fruit is tender.

  2. Let the mixture stand for another 24 hours.

  3. Weigh the fruit again and add 1.5 pounds of sugar for every pound of fruit.

  4. Boil briskly until the mixture jellies.

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
Supply the bitter peel and pectin-rich pith that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin, helping the marmalade gel and balancing the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled to a high concentration, helps it set into a gel.

The step that matters

Boil briskly until the mixture jellies. Pectin only forms a firm gel at high sugar and acid concentration and at a full rolling boil. Undercooking leaves marmalade runny, while overcooking can darken and toughen it.

“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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