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Dessert

Mock Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made from pickled limes, green tomatoes, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Lime and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,878 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mock Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cook the limes until they can be pierced with a straw.

  2. Drain the limes and remove the seeds.

  3. Chop the limes with the tomatoes.

Cook

  1. Add the sugar and cook together until thick.

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. Lime + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,878 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lime + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Tomato + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,667 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pickled limes
Provide the bitter, aromatic citrus flavour that gives the marmalade its character.
Green tomatoes
Add bulk and pectin-free body, mellowing the mixture into a spreadable texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and, as it cooks down, thickens it into a spreadable preserve.

The step that matters

Add the sugar and cook together until thick. Sugar both sweetens and helps set the preserve as water evaporates. Cooking too briefly leaves it runny, while cooking too long can scorch the sugar and darken the flavour.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lime, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lime, 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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