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Scotch Orange Marmalade

A marmalade made by boiling oranges with equal weight of sugar and water until it gels.

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

Scotch Orange Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Weigh the oranges and set aside an equal weight of sugar.

  2. Place the whole fruit in cold water to cover, bring to a boil, then pour off the water.

  3. Add fresh water and simmer until the fruit can be easily pierced with a fork.

  4. Cut the fruit into thin slices, discarding all seeds.

Make the marmalade

  1. Return the fruit to the water, add the sugar, and cook until it jellies, about an hour or less.

  2. Transfer to jars for storage.

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

Oranges
Provide the fruit, peel and pectin that give marmalade its body and bitter flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, with the fruit's pectin and acid, helps it set into a jelly.

The step that matters

Cook until the marmalade jellies. Sugar and pectin set only at the right concentration and temperature. Stopping too early leaves runny marmalade, while overcooking can make it stiff and dull in flavour.

“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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