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 ↓
Orange Marmalade
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the fruit
Cut the oranges in half and remove all the pulp and juice into a bowl.
Pick out the skins and seeds.
Boil the rinds in hard water until tender, changing the water two or three times.
Pound the rinds in a mortar.
Add the juice and pulp to the pounded rinds.
Cook and pot
In a preserving pan, combine the mixture with double its weight of loaf sugar.
Set over a slow fire and boil for half an hour or more.
Pour into pots and cover tightly with brandy paper.
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.
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Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Florida or seville oranges
- Peel supplies bitter pectin and aroma, while the pulp and juice add acidity and body.
- Loaf sugar
- Sweetness and preservation; sugar helps the marmalade set and keeps it from spoiling.
The step that matters
Boil the rinds until tender before adding sugar. Rinds must be fully softened before sugar goes in, because sugar hardens the peel and stops it from becoming tender. Changing the water removes excess bitterness.
“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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