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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges and lemons boiled with sugar and water.

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, removing the seeds as you slice.

  2. Place the sliced fruit in a stone jar and add 4 quarts of water.

  3. Let it stand for 36 hours.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for 1.5 hours.

  2. Add the sugar and boil for 1 hour until it reaches a jelly consistency.

  3. Do not use the ends of the fruit.

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 pulp supply aroma, bitterness and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Lemons
Add acidity, which helps the pectin form a firm jelly and brightens the flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it reach a jelly set.

The step that matters

Boiling with the sugar until jelly consistency. Sugar, pectin and acid set together only at a high concentration. Stopping too early leaves the marmalade runny, while boiling too long can make it stiff and grainy.

“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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