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Vegetable Marrow Marmalade

A sweet marmalade made from sliced vegetable marrows simmered in a sugar‑lemon syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Vegetable Marrow Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and seed the vegetable marrows, then cut them into thin slices.

  2. Weigh the marrows and use 1 pound of loaf sugar, the rind of half a small lemon, and 1 cup of water for every pound of marrow.

  3. Remove the thick white skin from the lemon, slice it, and remove the seeds.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the sugar and water to make a clear syrup.

  2. Add the marrows to the syrup and let them simmer gently for 1.5 hours, ensuring they do not burn.

  3. Mix the lemon slices with the marmalade and boil everything together for 15 minutes.

  4. Pour the marmalade into jars and cover them as usual.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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

Vegetable marrows
Form the bulk of the marmalade and, as they cook, soften into a tender, spreadable body.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, dissolved in water, forms the syrup that preserves and sets the marrow.
Lemon rind and slices
Add acidity and bright aroma that balance the sweetness of the marmalade.

The step that matters

Simmer the marrows gently. Marrow is mild and watery, and at a hard boil or without enough attention it can scorch on the pan base before the syrup has thickened and the pieces have turned translucent and tender.

“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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