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Sour-orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from orange peel, pulp, and juice sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sour-orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the peel

  1. Grate the yellow skin off the oranges using a vegetable grater.

  2. Peel the oranges.

  3. Cut the peel into quarter strips.

  4. Boil the peel in water until tender.

  5. Change the water three or four times with boiling water.

  6. Extract all the pulp and juice from the skin.

Extract the pectin

  1. Pour 2 cups of boiling water over the seeds.

  2. Let it sit until jelly-like.

  3. Strain the mixture.

  4. Save the liquid.

  5. Pour more water over the seeds.

  6. Let it sit until all jelly is extracted.

Make the marmalade

  1. Weigh the peel, pulp, and jelly water.

  2. Add an equal weight of sugar.

  3. Boil the mixture until it reaches a jelly-like consistency.

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 + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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 peel, pulp and seeds that supply the bitter flavour and natural pectin for setting.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the mixture set into a jelly when boiled.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until it reaches a jelly-like consistency. Sugar and pectin only set properly at the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while boiling too long can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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