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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made by boiling sliced oranges and lemons with water and sugar.

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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the oranges and lemons as thin as possible, removing seeds.

  2. Combine the sliced fruit with 3 pints of cold water.

  3. Let the mixture stand overnight.

Cook and set

  1. Boil the mixture for 30-40 minutes.

  2. Let the mixture stand until the next day.

  3. Measure the mixture.

  4. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pound of fruit mixture.

  5. Boil the mixture as you would for jelly.

  6. Boil smaller quantities at a time for better results.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pectin-rich pith that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and set.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and pectin, helping the marmalade set and balancing the sweetness.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps the preserve gel when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture as you would for jelly, in smaller batches. Marmalade sets because pectin, acid and sugar reach the right concentration while boiling. Boiling small quantities at a time lets the mixture reach gelling point quickly and evenly, so the fruit does not overcook or fail to set.

“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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