Skip to main content
Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, water, sugar, and lemon juice, boiled and poured into jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Cut up the oranges and weigh them.

  2. For every pound of fruit, add 3 pints (6 cups) of water and let it stand overnight.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for about 2 hours or until the oranges are tender.

  2. On the third day, add 1 pint (2 cups) of sugar for every pint of pulp and boil for 2.5 hours.

  3. Add the juice of 4 lemons just before removing from heat.

Finish and jar

  1. Pour the marmalade 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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

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

Oranges
Supply the peel and pulp that give marmalade its bitter flavour and natural pectin for setting.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates, helps the marmalade thicken and keep.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity, which helps the pectin from the fruit set the marmalade.

The step that matters

Add the lemon juice just before removing from heat. Acid helps pectin form a gel, so the lemon juice supports a good set. Adding it near the end keeps its bright flavour and lets the marmalade set as it cools.

“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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes