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Dessert

Transparent Marmalade

A clear marmalade made from Seville oranges, 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 ↓

Transparent Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the oranges

  1. Cut the Seville oranges in quarters and remove the pulp.

  2. Pick out the seeds and skins.

  3. Soak the orange peels in water with a little coarse sea salt overnight.

  4. Boil the peels in spring water until tender, then drain and slice them thinly.

Make the marmalade

  1. Combine the slices with the pulp and add 1.5 times the weight of sugar.

  2. Boil the mixture for 20 minutes, stirring gently to avoid breaking the slices.

  3. If not clear, simmer for an additional 5-6 minutes.

  4. Once cooled, transfer the marmalade into glasses.

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

Seville oranges
Provide the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and set.
Double refined sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, when boiled, helps it set and keep.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture gently. Stirring too vigorously breaks the peel slices into fragments, leaving a cloudy, mushy texture. Gentle stirring keeps the slices intact while the sugar concentrates and the pectin in the pulp and peel helps the marmalade gel.

“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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