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Orange Marmalade

A preserved fruit spread made from sliced oranges and lemons, sugar, and water, cooked until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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. Slice 5 oranges and 2 lemons very thin.

  2. Peel 3 oranges and squeeze their juice along with the juice of 2 lemons.

  3. Add the sliced fruit to the juice and water mixture, using ½ cup of water for every pound of fruit.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Cook the mixture until the fruit is tender.

  2. Add an equal weight of white sugar to the fruit.

  3. Cook for 40 minutes.

  4. Pour into jelly glasses.

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
Peel and pith add bitterness, and the juice and rind provide the citrus aroma and tang.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps the marmalade set.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it gel.

The step that matters

Adding the sugar. Sugar should equal the fruit weight and be added once the fruit is tender. Adding it too early can toughen the peel, and the right sugar-to-fruit ratio is needed for the marmalade to set properly.

“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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