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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges and lemons boiled with sugar.

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. Weigh the fruit and determine sugar amount: ¾ pound of sugar per pound of fruit.

  2. Remove the yellow rind from the oranges and lemons.

  3. Boil the rinds until tender, changing the water once.

  4. Discard the white rind and cut the fruit into small pieces.

Cook and set

  1. Add the yellow rind back to the fruit and boil until the mixture is clear and thick, adjusting water based on the juiciness of the fruit.

  2. Cook for about two hours.

  3. Add the sugar and boil until it slightly 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
Provide the bulk of the fruit, along with their rind and pectin-rich pulp for setting.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, helping the marmalade brighten and set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.

The step that matters

Add the sugar and boil until it slightly jellies. Sugar must be added at the right point, and the mixture boiled to the set point, so the marmalade thickens and gels rather than staying runny or becoming overly hard.

“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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