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Orange Marmalade

A preserve made from sliced oranges and lemons simmered with 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 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. Slice the oranges and lemons very thin, lengthwise.

  2. Add the water and cook for 1.5 hours.

Make the syrup

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a little of the cooking liquid.

  2. Bring the sugar mixture to a boil and skim off all impurities.

Finish and set

  1. Add the syrup to the fruit and cook for 20 minutes or longer if it seems too thin.

  2. Turn into sterilized glasses and set aside to harden, then cover with paraffin.

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 bulk of the fruit, bitter peel and pulp that give marmalade its character.
Lemons
Add extra acidity and natural pectin that helps the marmalade set.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, at high concentration, helps it gel and keep.

The step that matters

Skimming the sugar syrup. Impurities that rise to the surface of the boiling syrup can cloud the marmalade and affect its clarity and flavour, so they should be removed before the syrup is added to the fruit.

“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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