Name: Orange Marmalade
Ingredients: 2 dozen oranges; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); sugar (equal weight to orange juice)

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

2 dozen oranges
coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')
sugar (equal weight to orange juice)

Directions

Prepare the oranges

Cut the oranges in half crosswise and extract the juice using a glass lemon squeezer.
Remove the pulp and seeds, discarding them.
Soak the orange peelings overnight in salt and water.
In the morning, rinse the peelings and boil them in clear water until tender.

Make the marmalade

Chop the peelings and add the extracted juice.
Weigh the mixture and add an equal quantity of sugar.
Boil for thirty minutes.
Pour into jelly tumblers and cover as you would 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.

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: Peel supplies the bitter aroma and pectin-rich body, while juice provides the main liquid and tartness.
Sugar: Sweetness and, when boiled, thickening and preservation of the set marmalade.

“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.