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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

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

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 oranges

  1. Weigh the oranges before peeling and slice them very thin, skins included.

  2. Soak the sliced oranges in 8 cups of water for 24 hours.

Cook and set

  1. Boil gently, uncovered, until a fork easily penetrates the skins.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then measure the liquid.

  3. For each pint of orange mixture, add 1¼ pounds of sugar.

  4. Cook for 1¾ hours without stirring.

  5. Add the juice and rind of 5 lemons and seal the marmalade.

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 flavor and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it thicken and set as it cooks.
Lemons
Add acidity and pectin-rich peel and juice that help the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Cook for 1¾ hours without stirring. Sugar dissolves and the pectin from the peel and seeds gradually gels as the mixture concentrates. Stirring during the long cook can scorch the sugar on the pan bottom and disturb setting.

“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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