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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, sugar, and lemon juice.

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

  1. Combine the sliced oranges and water in a bowl and let stand for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture until the oranges are soft.

  2. Measure the fruit and add 1.5 pounds of sugar.

  3. Boil for 1.5 hours.

  4. Just before removing from heat, stir in the juice of 6 lemons.

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
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a thick, spreadable gel.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin, brightening the flavor and helping the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Stir in the lemon juice just before removing from heat. Acid added too early can be cooked off or change the set, while adding it at the end keeps the flavor bright and helps the pectin gel properly as the mixture 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.

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