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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from orange peels, juice, sugar, and optional lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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. Peel and quarter the oranges, removing the inner skin from the peels.

  2. Boil the peels in a large pot of water for 2 hours, changing the water with hot water as needed.

  3. Cut the peels into fine shreds.

  4. Press the insides of the oranges through a sieve.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Combine orange juice and a little water in a preserving kettle.

  2. Boil the mixture for a few moments.

  3. Add sugar and shredded peel.

  4. Boil for 20 minutes.

  5. (Optional) Add the rind and juice of 1 lemon for every 5 oranges.

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
Peel supplies pectin for setting, while juice and pulp provide the bulk and bright flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade, helps it set, and preserves it.

The step that matters

Soften the peels before adding sugar. Sugar firms the peel's tissue, so if the peels are not fully tender after the long boil, they stay tough and chewy in the finished marmalade.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Pineapplefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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