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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made by cooking sliced oranges and lemons with water and sugar until it sets into a soft jelly.

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 very thin without peeling them.

  2. Cover the slices with 4 quarts of water and let them stand overnight.

Cook

  1. In the morning, boil the mixture for about 3 hours or until tender.

  2. Measure the fruit mixture in a quart bowl. For every 4 quarts of fruit, add 3 quarts of sugar.

  3. Boil the mixture rapidly for 20 minutes.

Jar and set

  1. Pour into jelly glasses or pint jars.

  2. Allow to cool; the liquid should set into a soft jelly.

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 pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken into a jelly as it cooks.

The step that matters

Rapid boil before jarring. Boiling hard for the set time concentrates the sugar and fruit pectin until the mixture can gel on cooling. A gentle simmer may leave it runny.

“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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