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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from grated orange peel, salt, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Grate the yellow peel of each orange.

  2. Rub the grated peel with salt until absorbed.

  3. Place the oranges in a gallon jar and add salt to the jar.

  4. Pour boiling water over the oranges daily for three days.

Boil and cut

  1. Boil the oranges in fresh water for two hours.

  2. Cool the oranges in cold water.

  3. Quarter the oranges.

  4. Remove seeds and white pulp from the quarters.

  5. Slice the orange pieces finely.

Cook the marmalade

  1. Combine equal weights of oranges and sugar in a preserve kettle.

  2. Cook the mixture for two hours, stirring frequently while cooking.

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
Peel and pith supply the bitter aroma and the natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
White sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates, helps it thicken and set.

The step that matters

Stirring while the mixture cooks. As the mixture thickens and water evaporates, sugar and fruit can stick and scorch on the bottom of the kettle. Frequent stirring spreads the heat evenly and keeps the flavour clean.

“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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