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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from Seville oranges, common oranges, lemons, sugar, and water, boiled and sliced.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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. Boil the whole oranges and lemons in water for 5 hours.

  2. Scoop out the insides, removing the seeds.

  3. Cut the peels into thin slices.

Cook the marmalade

  1. For every pound of pulp and peel, add 1 pint of water and 2 pounds of sugar.

  2. Boil for 20 minutes.

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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic tang and aroma.
Lemons
Add acidity and extra pectin-rich pulp that helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and helps it set into a thick, spreadable preserve.

The step that matters

Boiling the whole fruit for 5 hours. The fruit must become fully soft so the peel stays tender after it is sliced. Undercooked peel stays tough and chewy in the finished marmalade.

“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.

More orange marmalade recipes

Seville 44Pudding 17Clear 10Scotch 6Bitter 4 See all 487 →

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