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Dessert

Orange Marmalade

A preserved orange and lemon mixture made by boiling peels, squeezing juice, and cooking with sugar until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 peel

  1. Cut the orange peels into four pieces and boil them in a large pot of water for 2 hours.

  2. After boiling, cut the peels into fine shreds.

  3. While the peels are boiling, press the inside of the oranges through a fine sieve to remove seeds and skin.

Make the marmalade

  1. For every 5 oranges, add the grated rind and juice of 1 lemon.

  2. Combine the shredded peels, orange juice, lemon juice, and sugar in a preserving kettle.

  3. Cook until the marmalade is thick and solid.

Jar

  1. Transfer to small preserving jars and cover tightly.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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).

Sugar and lemon 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
Supply the peel, which gives the marmalade its bitter flavor, and the juice that forms its base.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it cooks down, helps it thicken and set.
Lemon
Adds acidity and natural pectin that help the marmalade set.

The step that matters

Cook until thick and solid. Sugar and fruit pectin set only at a high enough concentration, so cooking must reduce the liquid enough. Stopping too early leaves a runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it stiff and sugary.

“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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