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Dessert

Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, sugar, and water, cooked by boiling and straining.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Grate one-third of the oranges and pour boiling water over the gratings.

  2. Cover until ready to cook.

  3. Cut the oranges into quarters and remove the skins.

  4. Scrape the pulp from the inner skins and wash the seeds and refuse in 2 pints of water.

  5. Strain the washed mixture into the marmalade.

  6. Boil the skins in cold water for about 4 hours.

  7. Cut the boiled skins into straw-like pieces and add to the mixture.

Cook and strain

  1. Strain the mixture, keeping the gratings separate, and add the water to the marmalade.

  2. Boil everything together for about 40 minutes, adding boiling water to the skins after an hour.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 fruit, peel and pectin-rich pith that give the marmalade its body and bitter flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a spreadable gel.

“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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