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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from oranges, lemons, water, and sugar, boiled and steeped.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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. Remove seeds from the lemons and chop the oranges and lemons together using a meat chopper.

  2. Add 11 cups of cold water and let it stand for 24 hours.

Cook

  1. Boil the mixture uncovered for 1 hour.

  2. Remove from heat, add 4 pounds of granulated sugar, and let it stand for another 24 hours.

  3. Boil steadily for 1.5 hours.

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. Lemon + sugartop 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).

Lemon and sugar 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
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavor and body.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled down, helps it gel and preserves it.

The step that matters

Boil steadily for 1.5 hours. Sugar and pectin only set into a gel once enough water has evaporated and the mixture reaches the right concentration. A gentle simmer may leave the marmalade runny, so the boil must be sustained.

“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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