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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges, water, and sugar, boiled and sealed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Slice the oranges as thin as possible, removing all seeds and cutting off the thick rind at each end.

  2. Cover the sliced oranges with 4 quarts of water and let them stand for 36 hours.

Cook and seal

  1. Boil the oranges in the same water for 4 hours.

  2. Add 8 pounds of sugar and boil for an additional 2 hours.

  3. Seal the marmalade tightly.

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 bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a spreadable gel as it cooks.

The step that matters

Boiling with the sugar for 2 hours. Sugar must be added to a long-simmered citrus liquid so the pectin can set. Too little boiling leaves the marmalade runny, while overcooking can darken it and make it taste bitter or caramelised.

“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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