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San Diego Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from San Diego navel oranges and lemons, cooked with water and sugar 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 ↓

San Diego Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the oranges and lemons thinly, then cut the peel into fine shreds.

  2. Remove the white skin and cut the pulp into fine pieces.

  3. Cover the pulp and shredded peel with cold water and let stand for 13 to 24 hours.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Cook the mixture until the rinds are tender, then add an equal amount of sugar.

  2. Continue cooking 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

Navel oranges
Provide the bulk of the fruit, bitter peel for flavour, and pectin-rich pulp for setting.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavour and helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it jell.

The step that matters

Cooking until the mixture jellies. Marmalade sets when pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves it runny, while cooking too long can make it dark and bitter.

“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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