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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A citrus marmalade made by steeping orange rinds and pulp in water, then reducing and sweetening until jelly-like.

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. Peel the fruit carefully, removing all the white part from the orange rinds.

  2. Cut the rinds into narrow strips using scissors.

  3. Cut the pulp finely.

  4. Add the rinds to 6 quarts of cold water.

  5. Cover and let stand overnight.

Cook and set

  1. In the morning, cook the mixture on the stove until it reduces to half the quantity.

  2. Add 3 scant quarts of granulated sugar.

  3. Cook until the juice thickens like jelly.

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. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. 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

Naval oranges
Supply the bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its characteristic flavour and pectin.
Lemons
Add acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade thicken and set.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with acid and pectin, helps it gel as it cooks.

The step that matters

Cook until the juice thickens like jelly. Sugar, acid and pectin set into a gel only at a high enough concentration, so the mixture must be cooked long enough to reduce. Stopping early leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Grapefruitthe original
  2. Limefits about as well
  3. Vanillafits less well
  4. Blueberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, 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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